Off-page search engine optimization

Last updated on December 24, 2010. Tags: back links, link building campaign, off-page SEO

The word off-page search engine optimization, or off-page SEO refers to a set of SEO techniques that involves creating backlinks from other websites to your website. That is why it is sometimes referred to as link building campaign.

The idea here is that search engines work in a way that links towards a certain page is counted as a "vote" to that page (or the whole website of link is towards the home page). Hence, the page with the greater number of incoming links has a better chance in reaching the top of SERP.

For search engines, the ideal scenario is that webmasters should not be exerting any effort to build backlinks. Others should link to your website (or web page) because they find your content interesting or important, and not because you requested them to or because of some other compensation like link exchange or money. However, there are a couple of reasons why you should build backlinks.

First, search engine robots need to arrive to your website from somewhere. This is essential if you don't want to use the submit feature of search engines.
Second, which I guess is the main reason why search engines tolerate backlink building, is the marketing strategy called social media optimization, wherein you simply build exposure for your website and backlink "vote" is simply a side-effect, not the main goal.

There are several different ways of building back links and acquiring back links has been an art form among web developers and search engine optimizers. Some of these techniques are:

participating in forums with link towards your site in your signature in profile page
opening accounts in social networking sites and placing links to your website from those accounts (if possible)
submitting your website to online directories
commenting on blog posts owned by another person or company (blogs usually have an available text box for website URL, which appears once your comment appears on the blog)
befriending other webmasters and requesting them to link back to your website

The above off-page techniques is ineffective (and certainly time consuming if you exert too much effort on them) if the websites from where you obtained your incoming links has something like meta content="robots" content="nofollow" in the header tag or automatically inserts rel="nofollow" in links made by non-administrators (in case of forums and blogs). Even if they don't have these codes, the owner can decide to put one at anytime in the future.

Similar to on-page SEO, these techniques can be classified as white hat or as black hat. The techniques enumerated in this page are all white hats but can be black hats when done in a very aggressive manner (such as when using programs to automate the process). You can check this article to know more about off-page white hat SEO, or this post to know more about off-page black hat SEO techniques.

Posted by Greten on May 21, 2009 under Definitions, Search Engine Optimization

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Posted by Julia – Blog Finder on 05.22.09 9:22 am

Thank you for sharing this great information. SEO is a mix of online and offline website optimization. Online optimization is primarily link building and offline optimization includes the optimization of the content, meta tags, headings for search engines. The best keywords should be wisely used in the text, titles, and meta tags to rank better in search engines.

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