Creating Incoming Links (off-page factors)
By far, the most important factor of Search Engine Optimization are the number, and quality, of links pointing to your website. You want to get as many high quality links to your site as you can.
So now you've probably figured out that off-page optimization consists of getting other websites to link to yours.
The following is a list of factors that search engines consider when it comes to off-page optimization factors; and you need to be aware of each of them:
- The number of websites linking to you
- Whether these sites are considered authority, government, or educational sites
- The overall rating of the site linking to you (this can be the Google PR or Alexa ranking)
- The number of outgoing links on the sites that point to you
- The quality and quantity of the links pointing to the site linking to you
- The text these sites use in their links that point to you
- The title of the page linking to you
Prefer one-way links
You should try to get as many one-way links as possible. This is when another website links to your site, but you do not link back. The search engines will give a higher importance to one-way links, which will help your rankings.
It can be difficult to get a lot of one-way links; most sites will want to exchange links with you so you will have to include a link to their site somewhere on yours. This will be the case if you use any kind of link exchange network (a place where you find sites related to yours in order to exchange links).
Use quality online directories get one-way links and increase your PR and link popularity.
Your ranking is affected by the sites you associate with
Avoid links from sites that have a large number of outgoing links, otherwise the search engines may penalize you for being associated with a link farm.
A link farm is a series of websites that all link to each other in order to get higher rankings on the search engines. The problem is that most search engines consider this to be a form a spam and have tweaked their algorithms in order to spot these types of websites and remove them from their listings.
You do NOT want to be associated with a link farm, as it will greatly reduce the amount of traffic you see over time. If a search engine, such as Google, decides you're violating their terms of service and bans you from their listings, you will have lost a very large source of traffic. Avoid this at all costs.
Focus on getting links from high PR sites, as they will help boost your ranking. It is always easier to get links from low PR sites, and this is ok when you're first starting out, but you should always try to target the high PR sites.
If you can get a link from a site the search engines consider an authority in your niche, you will find your rankings dramatically increase. The same is true for links coming form government or educational sites, however it may not always be possible to get links from these kinds of sites since they may not relate to your niche.
Use your keywords in the anchor text of the links and be sure to switch it up. Don't have all your incoming links say the same thing or the search engines might mistake it as spam. And to expand on this, it's also a good idea to have your links point to different pages, not just your main page. Have some of the links refer people to internal pages of the website. The point is to make your links appear as natural as possible to avoid them looking like spam.
It is better to generate links slowly. If you create too many links at one time, the search engines will send up red flags (they might think you're using link generating software). If you can generate several links a week, the search engines will consider your site to be increasing in popularity and your overall ranking will increase.
How do you get a top ranking in the search engines?
Analyze the on-page optimizations as well as the linking strategies of the top ranked websites in your favorite search engine. Find out what they're doing and do it better! It's not hard, with the proper tools, to find out the 'secret tactics' used by your competition. Once you figure out how they do things, you can just copy what they're doing, but do it a little better. This way you're sure to take their top rankings in the search engines!
In Part 2, we'll look an easy way to get a ton of quality on-way links to your website.
