Off-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO mainly refers to the whole area of links pointing to your website. These are commonly called “backlinks”. Off-Page SEO has more influence than on-page SEO, but it tends to take longer to do. Some experts consider that off-page SEO accounts for around 70% of your SEO success. In other words, to rank highly you need to have plenty of backlinks coming to your site combines with having your on-page factors also optimised.
Let us turn our attention to some of these off-page factors. Firstly, the number of incoming links is paramount. Google considers a link to your website as a vote of confidence for your website. The more votes people have more trust your site will exhibit. At least that is the theory. If your site has 1000 links to its home page and a competitor only had 10, in Google’s eyes this means that your site is popular and popular for a reason. Consequently, it is likely to show high up in the search engine rankings than your competitor.
However, search engine marketers soon caught on to this volume of links necessity and started spamming their homepages with as many links as they possibly could garner. Google caught onto this and modified its algorithm to help combat this link spamming. It started to look at the type of sites these links were coming from. If the site has a link from a site that was considered an authoritative — one that could be trusted — it carried more weight. A single link from an authoritative site could be equivalent to 100 or even more links from a non-authoritative site. Page Rank was used to help determine a website’s importance and authority. So a link from a high PR website is far more significant than links from low PR websites.
An additional algorithmic factor in off-page SEO is the anchor text of the inbound link. “Anchor Text” refers to the text that has been hyperlinked. For example, if a link has the text “weight loss” then Google uses this to suggest that your website is relevant if somebody types in weight loss into their search engine. If you have many backlinks to your website without anchor text of weight loss then it is likely that your page topic is considered important for this term. This helps your ranking.
Let’s look at where we are now then. Off-page SEO looks at the total number of backlinks, how authoritative the sites are where you have these backlinks and what the anchor text is on those links. Using this combination of off-page SEO factors can help Google get around the manipulation of ranking by Internet marketers. After all, Google wants to show the most relevant sites and not those which are just promoted by the smartest search engine marketers.
This has become a battle. The Internet marketers try to stay one step ahead of Google, while Google try to combat the ever evolving marketing techniques so that they show only the best and most relevant content to their users. Off-page SEO has become increasingly complex, as Google’s complex algorithm has evolved. In the early days, all you have to do was place your keywords in a meta keywords tag and you are likely to rank well for that term. But with each algorithmic update, more layers of sophistication and improvement are made.
There are many other factors that go into effective off-page SEO. Many we know about, others are just speculation. But rest assured this mix of off-page SEO factors are numerous and intelligently combined. The link velocity — speed with which links are created — is one of these speculative factors that search engine marketers dispute over whether it exists or not. If you create your links to rapidly, Google may consider that you are spamming and manipulating their search engine results and consequently penalised you by placing your website in their infamous sandbox. Or if you have been building links to your website and all of a sudden they stopped getting built, this sudden change to the link building trend may impact on its rank. Or, the deniers will suggest your drop in rank could be due to other factors. With the increasing complexity of Google’s algorithm, it is hard to single out what specifically is being caused by what.
In any case, off-page SEO is vital if you are looking to rank your website high within the search engines. To stay ahead of the game is a full-time job for many people. However, you can do well by studying well-researched and authoritative search engine marketing training material.
Tags: anchor text, backlinks, Inbound link, link buidling, Off-page, off-page seo, offpage seo, page rank, PageRank, search engine rankings, seo factors