Off Page SEO – The Real Power Behind a Website
There was a time when off page SEO didn’t really count all that much in getting a page ranked high. Some keyword stuffing with the title in the right place was more or less enough to get you going. All that changed some time ago, and while on page SEO is still very important, the real power behind a web site’s success lies in the off page SEO efforts.
Off page SEO is primarily concerned with one thing really: the link popularity of a page. This involves the number and quality of backlinks a page has. In a nutshell, the more backlinks of high quality you have, the better you can expect your page to rank. SEO advice often says that you should not target keywords with more than say, 50,000 competing sites. Why not? A keyword that has 50,000,000 competing sites can be beaten. All you need is more and better backlinks. It may take a lot of work, but it can be done.
Other factors also come into play with off page SEO. If you can get say, 1,000 backlinks to your brand new site, and you get them all within one day, that will look suspicious to the search engines. In other words, 1,000 backlinks takes a lot of work to get, and one person achieving that in one day is not really feasible. If, on the other hand, you get 1,000 backlinks spread out over three months, that’s much more believable. One person could do that.
The backlinks a web page gets will also have anchor text. That is the piece of text that constitutes the actual link. If that piece of text is also the main keyword of the page that is being linked to, that counts in the page’s favour. This is one reason why having “Click Here” is not a very good idea as a link to another page. It’s meaningless, unless your page contains information dedicated to the subject of “click here.”
While targeted anchor text in backlinks will help more than untargeted anchor text, if every one of your backlinks has the exact keyword that your page is focused on, that will also look a bit suspicious. In fact, it will actually work in your favour if some of the anchor text says, “click here!” It will look more natural and that is what the search engines want. They want to see web pages that appear to have become popular in a natural way over time. Off page SEO, properly planned and implemented, can achieve this to their satisfaction.
About seoblogger:
Our SEO blogger is an expert in Web Marketing, Usability and Interface Design. He has been a vital part of The Blue Cube Communications since 2003. As the West Midlands fastest growing web marketing agency, we always strive to maximise return on investment for our customers.
