Alot of my posts generally tend to follow in the direction of what I am doing with my blogs. If you haven’t noticed I have devoted more than a few posts to linking and the rules of linking. This is because I am on or at a stage where I am focusing on off site SEO.

Here are a few of the previous posts in case you’ve missed them.

10 tips - how to use social networking to gain valuable backlinks 

You are what you Link 

So I figured in the interests of those of you who are struggling with Off site SEO that I would continue on with this train of thought.

Its all about the link and the power it has in determining your positioning in the Search engines.

Links to your site is the most important Off-Site SEO tool. You can have the best SEO optimized wordpress template there is but with out relevant links flowing at you or even from you it is mostly just a pretty shiny object. Im not saying that the on page SEO tools you use aren’t going to be of any help. But you need the off site tools to influence the On page SEO variables

So I’ll say it again: Incoming links are what determines your natural search engine placement.  Remember I said in my last post “you are what you link“, that its like a survivor episode? it’s the links to you that determine the strength of your web pages as you compete for the top places in search engine results.

The strength of your link campaign will determine just how high in the search engines your web pages will be.

So what is a good plan (strategy) for off page SEO? 

1.) The first step, and the fastest way to get your foot in the door, is to get a listing from a popular directory, such as Open Directory Project - DMOZ and the Yahoo directory.

2.) Then concentrate on building in-coming links to your sites/blog. Word of caution about this. Dont freak google out by getting tons of backlinks all at once. Do it slowly and consistantly especially if your blog is new. I know it sounds dumb but thats the way Google is.

3.) The next step after you have you directory listings is to go find other quality niche related blog that will help increase your link popularity. keep in mind that these blogs should be somewhat related to yours, so not only will your link popularity increase, but your customer base may also be expanded. Heres an easy way to find blogs that use the NO FOLLOW attribute so you can comment on them and have some of their page rank juice passed along your way

4.) You want to avoid your competitors and look for sites that are useful to your site’s visitors. By linking to a related site that will be relevant to your website’s traffic, you are increasing both

of your site’s business prospects - and both of your sites’ link popularity.

This pattern is considered more natural and hence is rewarded with better organic search engine results. Yes it takes longer and you better be a patient bunny, but it will lead to better results in the long term. It’s all about spending your time finding the 20% of links that will give you the 80% of results. entreprenuers-journey.com

Not all sites want to link to other sites, mostly because they’re page rank hogs, so you will have to do some research when you are looking for possible linking partners.

I know some of you are probably thinking “yeah but I’m getting great listings for the long tail keyword phrase, and well you should be! SO am I. 

Lets look at this under the microscope a bit. Before Google starts ranking your blog for your popular or mainstream keywords you are going to see traffic appear on your “long tail terms,” and in time your blog will start to rank for your more generic terms.

How soon this starts to happen “can or may” be dependent on a 4 basic factors:

1. The speed that you get links pointing to your blog
   
2. The Quantity of links
   
3. The Quality (in the eyes of the Search engines) of the website/blog that’s linking to you
4. how you vary the anchor text in the links you’re submitting or having linked to you
   

I’m going to contradict myself a bit here so bear with me it’ll make sense in this context.

Don’t go crazy on the link building, build your links slowly.

Try to Avoid Sitewide links initially, This is kind of hard to do when someonelse is linking to you on their own, its one of the variables I spoke of earlier that you cannot control. WHY? the lack of variation in the anchor text will cause google to flag your blog or website (filter).

AT FIRST Don’t go solely after high PR links, get links from all sources. PR isn’t important, rankings are.

The key rule to understand is that it is a combination of variables that determine how well your site performs in Google. These are the most important variables to worry about:

Incoming links to your site.

The relevancy (to your site’s theme) of the pages linking to your site and the PageRank of these pages.

The keywords that other sites use to link to your site.

The keywords on your website in particular in places like page titles and headlines.

entrepreneurs-journey.com - page rank explained

If you’re buying or selling links? try to get links initially on individual pages. This will often be cheaper & more effective when your site is starting out. Read this warning about paid links hurting your rankings

Whats important is a balance of relevant links against not so relevant links (i.e. directories & blog comments, sponsored links).

Don’t submit your site to 500 directories with the same anchor text. Keep the anchor text unique.

What about reciprocal links?

Avoid it until you start to see your blog rank. And Please do Try to keep these links on topic.

Don’t just try to build links to your homepage, promote inner some of your inner pages and posts pages especially the ones that are converting well for you. This will help your inner pages rely less on the link popularity of your homepage & rank better.