What is Off Page Optimization?

This article comes as a follow up to our previous post  On Page Optimization seo. Now that you are familiar with the basics of on-page optimization, let’s move on to the next step – Off Page Optimization Seo. This too isn’t as complicated or as difficult as you would imagine. Off-page optimization is nothing but a number of strategies that you can implement off your web page to improve your search engine ranking and increase targeted traffic to your web site.

Off-page factors should be carefully planned and implemented to achieve a higher search engine ranking. Many people think that off-page optimization is just link building and go about it in a random and unplanned manner.

However, this is not going to bring much benefit to their site. They’re just going to waste a lot of time and efforts and not get any results. They need to consider several aspects before starting off-page optimization for their site. Given below is all the information you will need to know about off-page optimization. It is one of the best SEO Strategies to be used before starting the off Page Search Engine Optimization.

I. Factors to Consider Before Building Links

It’s not enough to get just any websites to link to you, the quality of inbound links is also very important. You may get 100 links but may not see any difference in your results if you don’t consider the following points:

1.       Inbound Links from Authority Sites

Authority sites are popular sites that people frequent, get linked to on the basis of their merit, or are referred by many when they need to check up on the subject. Getting links from known websites is priceless while doing off-page optimization for your website. It’s like a certificate from an authoritative figure who has acknowledged the quality of your page. For example, if your site is about current events or news, and CNN.com links to you, consider it as the best bonus ever!

Tip: Make your website as professional and informative as possible. If you give reliable and valuable information, it will instantly impress people. This will also increase the chances of getting linked by other such authority sites.

2.       Anchor Text of Inbound Link

Anchor text is the actual word or phrase of your link. It is important to have anchor text targeting your keywords because the search engines will notice this as a relevant link for your site. As you start getting more and more links with your targeted anchor text, your rankings for those terms will start to improve.

For example, if your site was about selling or renting houses then you should use your keywords in the titles: such as ‘Houses for sale’, ‘Houses for rent’, ‘Homes for sale’, ‘Homes for rent’, ‘Buy a house’, ‘Rent a house’ etc.

The most common anchor text is ‘Click Here’. Sometimes, it is not possible to choose the anchor text for your links from other pages, but for those sites where you can, you need to get it right. Some places where you can enter your own anchor text are online web directories and social bookmarking sites. However, for those sites which do not, you could try sending a request asking if the anchor text can be modified to make it more relevant for your site. You’ll be surprised to see many of them would make the necessary changes.

Tip: Try to include your keywords in your anchor text. Decide what keywords you want to rank for and include them in your anchor text. However, be careful because your anchor text should not read like a string of keywords, it should make sense as well.

3.       PageRank of Incoming Links

Google Page Rank is a tool developed by Google to determine the importance of a website or a webpage based on clearly defined set of algorithms. It is ranked on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the highest. Whenever you link out to another website, you pass on some of your page rank value. Similarly, if you get a link form a high PR page, your site will also benefit from a fraction of the PR value of that page.

PageRank is based on incoming links, but not just on the number of them – relevance and quality are also important (in terms of the PageRank of sites, which link to a given site). However, not all links weigh the same when it comes to PR. If you had a web page with a PR8 and had 1 link on it, the site linked to would get a fair amount of PR value. But, if you had 100 links on that page, each individual link would only get a fraction of the value.

Tip: While links from high PR sites may be beneficial to your PR, do not restrict your off-page link building activities just on the basis of PR.

4.       Placement of Link in Web Page

The position of your link from another website says a lot about it to search engines. Links can be placed in the footer, header, sidebar or inside the content. With so many people selling links in their sidebar or footer, search engines might possibly give these links slightly lesser value. The ones placed as a part of the content (contextual links) could be considered more valuable than the sidebar or footer links.  There is a growing amount of importance of placing links on a page in a natural manner.

Tip: Try to get links from a page which does not have too many other links. The page you are getting a link from should not be one which makes it obvious that they sell links.

5.       Get Links from Relevant/Related Sites

It doesn’t make much sense when an astrology site links to a website that deals with cars. The topics are niche and completely irrelevant to each other! The audience you are looking at can’t be any more different (unless you want to ask the psychic if the car’s registration number will bring you luck!) This type of linking is not only worthless but if you have exchanged links to get that link, you’re also putting your page at risk. The search engines will smell something fishy and suspect a link trade because the sites aren’t related in any way. So, always try to get links from websites that are related to your topic.

Tip: As mentioned above get the majority of links from sites that have similar topics. Even if you are getting it from general sites like online directories or social bookmarking sites, your link should be placed under the correct category.

In The next post we will discuss about Link Building Techniques.

What Is On Page Optimization ?

It takes more than just good content to get your website ranked well by search engines. Your site has probably not ranked well enough till now only because your site was not very “understandable” to the search engines. Let’s say there has been a communication gap in between the two. However, it is not an irreversible state. This is a very common problem and can easily be corrected with some ‘On page Optimization Seo’.

Let me start with the basics and tell you what on page seo is. On page Optimization SEO is the process of modifying content and certain html tags of your website to make it more search engine friendly. On-page factors are under your control and can be altered by tweaking the content of your website appropriately. The importance of on-page optimization cannot be stressed enough as it is the basis for search engines to understand the theme and relevance of your website.

Don’t worry; it is not as complicated as it may sound. Let me give you a few crucial points on how to do on-page optimization for your site and be super successful!

Let’s say you have a website that repairs cars. How would you go about optimizing it?

1. Start with keyword research

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is the practice of finding relevant search terms and phrases that people use in conducting searches online and determining the keywords most suited to your website.

So let’s start with your site, since your website targets used car repairs, what words would they type in the search engine? Note down your keywords. It probably includes ‘repair cars’, ‘car repair shop’, etc

After compiling a list of probable keywords/phrases that your target audience might use in the search engines, you can go one step further & use some great keyword research tools available online. Using the tool, you will hopefully be able to conclude on certain terms that are not too competitive to target & yet are relevant enough to connect you with your target audience.

1. Website Structure

Every website’s coding structure is divided in to two parts: a Head and a Body. 

If you are thinking that I am going to teach you coding and programming, I’m not! Rather, I am just going to explain how you can tweak certain elements in each of these sections to your advantage:

Meta Tags

The Invisible <HEAD> Portion

The HEAD is like a cover page of a book which gives direct information about its content. The HEAD consists of multiple tags with the Title and Meta tags being the more important ones.

Title:

The title is what appears on the top of your browser, giving brief information about the page. The title is important because the search engines use it to determine the theme & context of the site, the same way we read the title of a book to know what it’s about.

Meta tags: 

Meta keywords is a tag that is no longer considered as important by the search engines but it is still considered good practice to optimize. It’s a tag which contains a list of your target key terms for that page. E.g. <meta name=”keywords” content=”Your targeted Keywords”>

Meta description is a brief snippet about the contents of the page that could be used by the search engine when displaying your site details in the search results. If you do not give a meta description, you have no control over what the search engines will display when showing your results.

The Visible <BODY> Portion

The BODY in html consists of everything that is visible to people who open your website. Think of it like the actual content of a book with many pages. There are multiple elements in the BODY which you would want to consider tweaking.

Headings:

Heading tags (H1, H2 tags) are used to label your headline and are considered important information by search engines. Search engines assume that headings give an idea about the theme of the page and are thought to be given slightly more importance than the page content itself. It should be carefully chosen and injected with relevant keywords.

Content:

You want to make sure you include the right keywords in the contents of your page. You want to ensure you include similar words and phrases throughout the content while ensuring it’s not overdone. Using similar keywords throughout also helps. Although it’s very important to remember that while writing your content, you want to first focus on writing for your end user and making the content most appealing to them. Only once that objective is achieved, then you can try incorporating these changes in your content to suit the search engines while ensuring you’re not compromising on the quality of the content.

Some of us also get so caught up in making our site attractive, forgetting that search engines cannot read Flash animations. So if you want to have a Flash based website, you want to make sure you also include a non-flash version for the search engines to read (some of your users as well might prefer viewing a non-flash version).

Optimizing your Internal Linking Structure:

Internal linking allows users to navigate to other sections of your website. Internal linking plays a crucial role in page ranking. Use relevant anchor text, with keywords of course, to link to other pages of your website, but only if it’s relevant.

Do not leave images unattributed:

Search engines can read only text, not images. By using alt attribute in your image tags, you can describe images with text, letting search engines detect images which are otherwise left ignored. When an internet user looks for images on search engines like Google image search, only websites that have textual descriptions of images will show up. For example: if you have a picture of an Audi, make sure you enter the name ‘Audi’ for the picture. The search engines might not be able to view the picture, but they will know that you have a picture of an Audi in your site through the tag.

What is a Search Engine ?

Basically, a search engine is a software program that searches for sites based on the words that you designate as search terms. Search engines look through their own databases of information in order to find what it is that you are looking for.The term "search engine" often is used interchangeably. Search engines automatically create web site listings by using spiders that "crawl" web pages, index their information, and optimally follows that site's links to other pages. Spiders return to already-crawled sites on a pretty regular basis in order to check for updates or changes, and everything that these spiders find goes into the search engine database. 

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ?

Whenever you enter a query in a search engine and hit 'enter' you get a list of web results that contain that query term. Users normally tend to visit websites that are at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the query. If you have ever wondered why some of these websites rank better than the others then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural," or un-paid, search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search, news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.