In our previous post “Basic Principles of Good SEO“, we mentioned that there are two categories that you should focus on for your SEO efforts. In that article we covered the first category “On Page SEO”, which includes all of the tactics that you can use to optimize the structure of your website, pages and posts, to enhance the ability of the page to be indexed by the search engines and produce desirable ranking results.

Today, we are going to cover the second category for your SEO Strategy – Off Page SEO.

With On Page SEO you really have a fine grain of control over the outcome of your efforts. It’s easy to adjust the structure and content of your page to optimize it for search engines and the results can be manifested fairly easily. For instance – submitting your website’s site.xml to the search engines can generate an uplift in traffic as the search bots index your pages. However, Off Page SEO takes more time to develop and while you may be able to provide initial input into building your Off Page SEO strategies, growing these strategies to the level where you can start to see benefits takes time.

You can think of off-page SEO as being all of the activities that can be performed to build your websites presence across the internet. Now I know that sounds like a very broad statement and that is because Off Page SEO is a very broad area to cover. Off Page SEO includes these following areas;

• Building Links
• Building your Social Presence
• Building a Traffic Strategy
• Building Authority

So let’s start the detailed discussion of Off Page SEO by breaking down each of these categories with a definition of each as well as a few ideas that you can use to implement them into your website’s SEO Strategy.

Building Links – Common Back Link Building Strategies

The search engines use links, or more commonly called “Back Links”, to your website as a measure of your sites popularity. Back Links are links that exist on other websites and reference pages and posts on your website.

Build a backlinking strategy into your off-page SEO utilizing white hat techniques

It’s commonly believed that the more back links you have to your website the higher your website will appear in search results. In addition, back links to your website carry weight based on the website that is linking back to you. This weight is based on the websites page rank (otherwise known as PR).

Back links from higher PR rated websites provide better credibility to your website than links from lower PR websites.

Many website owners have tried to game the search engines by building back links to their website using “Black Hat” tactics.

Here’s a warning – Never use any artificial mechanism to build back links to your website. Many website owners have found their entire website removed from the search engines because they falsely built back links to their website using artificial back link strategies.

Build back links to your website naturally by posting great content and encouraging your readers to comment and share your content. Building back links will take time, but if you create your posts with your back link strategy in mind then over time you should see good results from your efforts.

Another great method for encouraging the natural building of back links to your website is to offer an RSS feed of your website’s content. An RSS feed makes sharing and back linking to your content easier for other website owners. In addition, consider syndicating your RSS feed for additional back link building.

Building Your Social Presence

Social Media is a hot topic these days… When we mention the topic of Social Presence, we are talking about your general social media strategy. Do you have a Google + account? How about Facebook and Twitter?

Believe it or not your social presence is playing a bigger and bigger role in your website’s SEO. My recommendation is that you begin by building your social presence by creating account on the following social media sites;

• Google+ – Google is listed here first because I firmly believe that this social media site provides the highest exposure and helps build more social credibility that the others below. I know some people will argue with me on this point but my feeling is that if you are trying to get your website ranked on the search engines then the first social media site you should join is the one owned by the largest search engine on the planet.
• Facebook – Facebook is ranked by Alexa as being the 2nd most popular website in the world right behind the #1 spot held by Google. Facebook is probably the best known social media website therefore, it just makes sense to create your second social media account here.
• Twitter – The king of the “Short Status Post” social media sites. Creating an account on twitter is easy, fun, and valuable to your customer service. It makes staying in touch with your customers easy and provides a good way to judge the pulse of your company’s presence.
• LinkedIn – the professional social media site. This social media site is especially valuable to service oriented professionals.
• Other Social Media Sites – there are many other social media sites that are available. More pop up each day. Watch for news about the latest social media craze and join these sites to help build your Off Page SEO.

Establishing your Social Presence will help build your customer base, but don’t just create social media accounts and then ignore them and let them become ghosts on the internet. You need to actively participate in the social media sites that you join. Keep your content and posts relevant to your audience and provide information that your followers will repost and “Like”. Build a solid social presence and this will help build your Off Page SEO and your credibility.

This also leads us right into the next topic on your Traffic Strategy. Social Media is a great way to make people aware of your brand and promote your website to build traffic to your site.

Building a Traffic Strategy – Get More Visitors to Your Website

Traffic is a key element to your website’s success and is the end result of good On Page and Off Page SEO. So naturally, the more successful your SEO strategies are, the more traffic you can expect to receive to your website. However, generating traffic to your website has a reciprocal effect to your SEO too. If you have a popular site that is getting a lot of traffic then the search engines take notice and rank your site higher in the search engine results.

Traffic and SEO result in the chicken and egg effect!

You want to create a strategy for generating good quality traffic to your website. Whether you use paid advertising, solo ads, social media advertising or other various advertising methods available for your website promotion you want to be sure that you are generating traffic to your website that is sticky.

Sticky traffic is the type of traffic where the visitor comes to your website and browses around on more that just the first page that they land on. If visitors hang around on your site, visiting various pages then the search engines view these visits differently than a visitor that comes to your site and then leaves 10 seconds later. So focus on generating quality traffic to build your Off Page SEO. Besides, if the visitors hang around on your site long enough then they just might buy something from you!

The best way to ensure quality traffic is to market and promote your website to the proper audience. Pick an audience that your website’s content will be relevant to and customize your marketing to their specific needs. This will take some time to perfect but it will pay off in quality traffic and customers for your business.

Building Authority

To start, let me explain that this one strategy is going to be the hardest one to accomplish. It’s going to take time to build your website as an Authority website. It’s going to require success in the other areas of SEO before your website is regarded as an authority site. Consider this the holy grail of SEO success.

What is an Authority website?

“An Authority Website is considered as a website that is made up of high quality content that is relative to it’s target audience. For instance, CNN’s website would be regarded as an Authority Website in the News industry because it’s content is highly regarded and valuable to it’s visitors. Authority websites generally are established websites that have include a large network of websites that link back to the Authority website’s content.”

How do you find an Authority Website? This article written by SearchEngineWatch.com provides a good starting point for identifying and locating authority websites in your niche.

Your goal with your website should be to develop it into the “Authority Website” for your niche. Depending on your niche and the number of competitors in your market, building your website into an Authority website will have varying levels of difficulty. However, succeeding in this goal will assure you of top exposure in the search engines and sky rocket your off-page SEO results.

Summary

This wraps up our series on the Basic Principles of Good SEO. In this series we talked about the various points that you should address in your efforts to improve your websites SEO.

In part one of this series we touched on the basic items of on-page SEO that can have an immediate impact to your websites rankings. These basic areas included keywords, content, link structure, and metadata.

In part-two we have just covered the strategies for off-page SEO and how they can improve your website rankings.

We hope that the information we have provided you, in the two top categories of On-Page and Off-Page SEO, will be helpful in your quest for improving your website’s ranking on the world’s search engines.

This is the second part of a two part article on Basic Principles of Good SEO. You can find our first article titled Basic Principles of Good SEO here.

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