For any webmaster, fully understanding off site SEO techniques is something which takes time, experience and patience to master. Given the dynamic nature of the search engines (Google is the only one right?) the search landscape is constantly changing and at the last count Google stated that it makes one change per day to the algorithm on average making over 300 changes each year.
Below is a video from Google’s Matt Cutts explaining this in more detail;
Is ‘content king’? interesting remarks he mentioned in the video around content being necessary and having quality content making things much easier to SEO but with emphasis upon the fact even great content is not enough to get it ranked in Google. That sounds familiar, read this creating content article for help on giving your website copy a kick start.
So, we know that many changes are made which only makes our jobs of identifying effective off site SEO techniques that much harder. Do not despair however given there are a number of key principles to follow which experience shows us do not change over time and can be consistently applied to your websites in order to achieve better search engine rankings than you would have otherwise.
Off site SEO techniques
1. Guest Posts
Guest posts are and continue to be an effective method in obtaining backlinks to your website and pages from domains with high authority. In order to achieve this you are going to need to create a good quality article for the guest post. If you maintain the quality webmasters will publish your content without question and will also in some cases allow you to leave a contextually related backlink within the body of the article providing even more juice to your website.
2. Directory Submissions
Yes, you heard that right – many people consider the days of submitting your website to hundreds of low weighted directories a complete waste of time and if you adopt this approach you will indeed be wasting your time. There are however a large number of high quality directory websites which have superb inner category pages with high page rank (PR). For the most part you will have to pay a small fee for inclusion however typically the fees are as low as a few dollars per year. Given the strength of these pages you do not need many of these – I recommend around 5-10 submissions to inner pages of no less than PR4 with a low outbound link count each month to achieve excellent increases in search positions.
How do you find these high page rank directories? That is a trade secret I am afraid and one which we offer all our clients therefore if you would like to see your sites positions in the serps taken to the next level drop us a line.
3. Web 2.0 Submissions
Leveraging the power of the many web 2.0 properties is a tried and tested approach to building links and authority to your domain. Web 2.0 off site SEO techniques include creating a quality article to the likes of Squiddo or Scridb each with a anchored back link to your website. Those of you experienced in SEO may notice that Scridb utilises the “rel=nofollow” attribute within its outbound links. In our experience this has not stopped this powerful platform from providing significant search engine ranking improvements as well as driving targeted traffic to your website.
Off Site Seo Techniques Roundup
These are just a small selection of the off site SEO techniques we employ at rmgseo.com, there are many more. The main issue to take away here is that renowned ethical and constructive practices will always rein over that of lower quality methods. This is particularly true in the current search climate following the Panda update. Focus your off site SEO techniques in areas which provide consistent and high quality results and the search engines will sit up and take notice and remember, great content by itself is not enough to rank it well in the search engines.