Doing SEO Work Off-Site
There’s a common misconception that everything in SEO has to be performed within the confines of your own website. In fact, a great deal can be done in the outer peripheries of your site’s sphere to help boost your search engine optimisation efforts.
Link building is done almost exclusively away from your site. Whilst of course it is preferable to attract links organically through providing interesting content, through the pages of your site or blog posts (often referred to as link building), there’s plenty more that you can be done elsewhere.
For example, you might have suppliers, clients and other affiliates who have their own sites and can provide a link in to yours. This will build up your linking profile and should give you some strong, relevant links that will add real value to your optimisation efforts.
At this point it is best to reaffirm that it is always recommended to gain links from credible sites, with greater value ascribed to those that are relevant to what your keywords are targeting. Gaining thousands of links from poor sites may have just the same level of success as one from a very strong source. I say may, because it is often very difficult to measure effectiveness, other than it is well known that the stronger the site, the stronger the link it provides becomes.
Another way to gain links is through syndicating your documents. Perhaps you could do some guest blog posts on some high profile websites, or even write some articles and distribute through article submission sites. There are options aplenty and the more content you can get out there with your name on it and a link back to your site, the more opportunities you’ll have to gain more links and more traffic for your site.
Visibility online isn’t just about search engines. You need to have your content spread far and wide; as previously stated, it is essential that you have as much content with your name on it in the most obvious places. This might mean the major article sites, some others like Squidoo or eHow and any other blog or forum that will allow content with links.
Followed links offer the biggest benefit, so where possible you need to chase these. There’s no harm in no-follow links, in fact it has been claimed that they do little for PageRank sculpting, but they won’t pass on as much of that vital link juice – which will ultimately help you gain additional strength. It won’t always be apparent which are followed and which aren’t, but where possible find out and make the most of it.
Also use text links, which includes your keyphrase for whatever page you’re linking, where possible. When requesting links from secondary sites it is always worth asking for these, although some site owners won’t be able to oblige of course.
Finally, try not to buy links. Whilst this is a grey area, it is best not to try to pull the wool over the search engine’s eyes. Link buying is against their codes of practice and will often mean severe penalties if you are discovered. It really isn’t worth the risk.
