Offsite SEO

Offsite SEO is a combination of many things, but can be broadly defined as one activity: link building.

Link building is as fundamental to SEO as good keyword research ? without it, SEO just won?t happen. In order to achieve higher search engine rankings, a website must be fully optimised onsite and offsite.

Link building works by passing ‘link juice’ to your website pages, which increases their respective PageRank, it has been established that increasing your website’s PageRank is a positive ranking factor. To encourage the flow of link juice from other websites to yours, you must create links on pages with higher PageRank than the intended link target.

Once link juice is flowing into your website, it can then be distributed to other pages via interlinking, which increases the PageRank of an individual page.

Building links willy-nilly to a website is not enough ? links must be carefully selected and scrutinised in order to establish whether the link is worth obtaining. A general rule is that the easier a link is to get, the less value it will carry.

What’s in a link?

In order to build a link which passes link juice effectively, there are many things to consider:

• PageRank of the link’s source page – the higher this is, the more link juice can be passed.
• The link must be followed – if a nofollow command is placed on the link by the source page, no value whatsoever will be passed by the link.
• Anchortext – this is crucial, as it helps increase the relevance of your website. Using a keyword to link to your website tells the search engines what the page you are linking to is all about.

Where can I get links?

You can build links to your site in a number of ways:

• Creating interesting content that encourages people to share it by linking to it
• Submitting your website to reputable directories
• Writing articles which are relevant and useful to others in your industry, and syndicating them online
• Posting in related forums and blogs
• Buying links – although this should be done sparingly, and never from ‘link farms’, which are websites created solely for link building and can result in penalisation.

Link Building is the essence of offsite SEO, and should never be ignored. It is not a difficult process, but it is vital to build links correctly in order to gain maximum benefit.