Off-Page SEO – Overview

The cornerstone of any off-page SEO campaign or indeed any SEO campaign is link building. What this means, is that we are going to place a link to your site, from other sites on the web. These links are built “off” your pages, hence the term off-page SEO. Search Engines mainly rate website “popularity” on how many incoming links you have.

You may have heard the term “link Juice” before, the more Link Juice you have, the more popular your site, the higher your site is ranked in the Search Engines.

A few conversation pieces to get us started with off-page SEO:

– 20 high quality links are better than 200 poor quality links.
– Links need to be built gradually, say 30 per day for a new Domain
– Links don’t last forever. Link building through Off-page SEO is an ongoing process!

I mention Google here, because it is the most used search engine, and where you can expect to get most of your traffic from, through off-page SEO. Note – other search engines will also take a negative view on too many links being built up all at once. For new sites, a good goal is around 30 backlinks per day.

Time to elaborate on the above points:

What Makes a High Quality Link?

There are 3 main factors that I use to determine a high quality link

– Google Page Rank (PR)
– Whether the link comes from an .EDU or .GOV website
– Whether the link is DoFollow or NoFollow

Google Page Rank (PR) is how popular Google deems a website. Nobody knows for sure how a website gets its’ PR from Google, but we do know Google puts more emphasis and weight on links incoming to your site, from pages with a high PR.

A word of caution here, just because the main page of a website has a high PR, doesn’t mean to say the inside pages are of equal PR. PR is allocated on a per page basis, not per website. There are many free web resources for finding the PR of a particular web page – just Google “Google Page Rank Checker”

As for EDU and GOV links. Search Engines go crazy over them! If you can double up and create a few EDU or GOV backlinks from pages that also have a high PR – that’s some strong link juice right there!

Finally, when we are concerning ourselves purely with off-page SEO, we should focus on Do-Follow links. These are backlinks search engines give your website credit for in terms of search engine rankings. No-Follow links do have their purpose, for example some article directories are no follow, but do generate considerable traffic from people reading articles and clicking through to your site.

Why do we Gradually Build Links?

If Google suspects you of using spamming methods to using off-page SEO techniques, it will “sandbox” your site. Sandboxing is basically blacklisting, and all the major Search Engines have one form of sandboxing or another.

Again the mysterious Google eludes us as to the fact of just how many links it considers “spammy”. From what I have read, a number between 20 and 40 per day seems realistic to avoid sandboxing, but depends highly on how long your website has been established and how many current backlinks you already have. Keep to a maximum of 20-30 per day for new sites!

The easiest way to avoid sandboxing is to manually create links, and not spamming them. Just so happens that’s what we will be focusing on. If you ever suspect your site of being blacklisted, type the following into Google search:

site: www.yoursite.com – If your site has been sandboxed, no results will show.

Why don’t Links Last Forever?

A number of reasons. Sites shut down, webmasters archive older material or remove it. Google doesn’t keep a cache of backlinks to your site. It constantly visits sites and harvests link information (crawls). If your link is not there anymore, it updates its database of how many links point to your site.

That’s why we have to keep up with building new backlinks through off-page SEO. You might find you are losing about 5-10% of your backlinks a month, depending on the quality of where your links are coming from. So if you have a total of 1,000 backlinks, you would need to build at least 100 per month to safely sustain your number of backlinks.

That’s a brief overview of off-page SEO. However, there is another part. You understand now that off-page SEO relates to building links from other websites back to your own, but a backlink is worthless unless the search engines know about it! The real key to link building is getting the search engines to know about your backlinks, or “indexing” them, but I will save that for another article!

Stephanie is the co-webmaster of www.howtobeginawebsite.com – a site dedicated to helping you build a successful website.

For more information related to this article, please see How to Begin a Website’s page on Off-Page SEO

Author: StephanieTully

This author has published 6 articles so far. More info about the author is coming soon.