The Best Off-Page SEO Strategies

March 19th, 2012

Search engine optimization techniques can change as quickly as the weather, and what you learned—and put into practice—today, may be outdated by tomorrow. Unless you are an avid reader of all the latest SEO practices, you could easily lag behind in the race for newer, better, more productive SEO methods. On-page SEO concerns what search engine spiders can glean about your site through the content and structure of your website. On-page SEO will have you looking at your keyword selections as well as how your meta and ALT tags are used to your advantage. On-page SEO encompasses internal links, content, keyword density and site maps. Off-page SEO, however, refers to activities which are conducted away from your own website, such as the number of inbound links from other websites—also known as backlinks.

Why are Inbound Links Important?
Search engines use inbound links as a method of establishing trust, determining relevancy and gauging the popularity of your site. The more websites which the search engine finds which are linking back to your site the higher your own web pages will rank. Because of the vast amount of websites delivering low-quality content, Google has attempted to minimize this through inbound link perusal. The theory is that if other high quality websites are linking to your site, they apparently believe it to be worthy and credible.

Start a Blog
Blogging is one of the primary—not to mention the most powerful—ways to promote your company online. If you write a blog which includes huge amounts of unique and informative content that others in your niche will find helpful, interesting or even amazing, you have taken a very important step in off-page SEO. You can promote your blog through posting your own comments in other blogs within your niche or service-related blogs which allow links in the comment section, just don’t go overboard.

Commenting on other’s blog sites in your area of expertise will also increase the chances of others visiting your blog so long as you always leave your URL site when you comment. Blog commenting can generate valuable backlinks much more effectively than you might imagine, but take the time to really read the other person’s blogs, and make intelligent and provocative comments.

Help Crawlers Find Your Content
Keep the titles and descriptions for your webpages as clear and relevant as possible. Search engine spiders have a memory of sorts, so the first impression of your website is critical. It’s better to put your best foot forward from the very beginning, rather than to try and go back later and re-work pages in an attempt to convince the spiders to give you another look. Help search engines find your content through sitemaps and lots of relevant internal links, and make sure your URL strings are not full of garbage.

Register your Website in Lots of Web Directories
You want maximum visibility for your website, and website directories are a bit like the yellow pages in that they allow visitors to find your information. You will place a link in the directories back to your site, so that visitors who are searching for information can read about your site. Being registered in web directories also lends credence and authority to your site.

Using Social Media to Your Advantage
Social networking sites can be great places for gaining fans, friends and followers, not to mention making valuable business contacts and expanding your network. Facebook is the leader of the pack, although many businesses also incorporate Twitter and LinkedIn into their social media off-page SEO.

There are many more off-page strategies such as advertising using Google Adwords to promote your site, participating in forum posting in your niche, targeting an audience through the use of a press release, exchanging links with reputable webmasters and article submission, to name a few. Start slowly and work your way through a few of them and you will be amazed at how quickly your site will climb the ranks and how successful it will be in attracting highly targeted traffic.

Tactics Which Can Kill Your Website’s SEO

March 16th, 2012

While some SEO tactics are simply ineffective, others can be considered downright unethical, although you obviously want to avoid both types. SEO practices which are considered less than ethical are known as “black hat” techniques (as opposed to “white hat” SEO techniques which are not only acceptable but desirable). The ineffective SEO techniques take your time and money, yet produce only short-term results, so you want to guard against them as well.

Commonly Used Less-Than-Ethical SEO Techniques
A link farm is a group of websites which have been created with no other purpose than to generate backlinks to other sites. These sites have absolutely no useable content of their own, rather they simply sell links to those who are attempting to add links to their website and increase their rankings. This is an SEO technique which is simply not worth it for a variety of reasons. Not only are you required to shell out money for the links, but as soon as Google—or any other search engine—recognizes the site as a link farm they will ignore all the links, and may even penalize you for using such a low-level technique.

Cross-linking is also considered an unethical practice, and consists of one person having multiple websites, and linking between them—for the sole purpose of creating links. While it can be perfectly acceptable to occasionally link one of your sites to another, creating sites which have no value in themselves simply to be able to add another link is not only a waste of your money, but just like link farming can end up getting you penalized. There is virtually no reason to engage in cross-linking when you can easily get links simply from writing high quality articles and posting them on your primary website.

Cloaking your website involves returning altered website pages to the spiders which crawl your site while your human readers see something entirely different. The goal of cloaking is to improve your search engine rankings by misleading search engines into thinking your content is different than what it actually is. It’s much easier simply to optimize your content to begin with than to risk having your site removed or blacklisted when the cloaking is discovered. Any site that appears differently to a search engine than to the human eye will be deemed to be engaging in cloaking, preventing the search engines from effectively doing their job—and costing you dearly.

Keyword stuffing is also frowned upon by search engines, but more importantly can alienate your readers. Inserting a large number of keywords into your content and meta tag in an attempt to increase your site’s rankings and bring more traffic to your website—artificially—is known as keyword stuffing and it is considered unethical, and, in some cases can be considered an attack technique. This means the keyword stuffing is used to send traffic to websites which are considered fraudulent or even malicious. Keywords may also be hidden in the content through matching the font color to the background, or putting the keywords behind an image. Google’s increasingly sophisticated algorithms have enabled it to quickly identify irrelevant terms as well as to spot keywords which are clearly out of context or simply overused. Google may remove a site completely if they detect the use of keyword stuffing, so don’t do it. Use your keywords wisely, but always make sure they make sense within the context of the content.

Don’t waste your valuable resources engaging in unethical or black hat SEO techniques, rather take the time to set your site up correctly right from the beginning, and only use time-proven, high quality, ethical practices which will move your site up the ranks slower, but steadily, without the potential for penalties or banishment.

Strategies for Advanced Link Building

March 15th, 2012

If you’ve had your website for any length of time, you are aware that the strategies for search engine optimization are ever-evolving. There is a fierce level of competitiveness in current Internet marketing, meaning traditional methods of getting your site to the top ranking may get stomped on, on any given day. Creativity is crucial, and combining this with varied strategies may possibly offer the only real hope for even the most seasoned website optimizers. So, when building your linking strategies, remember to think out of the box then take the appropriate action to ensure that creative thinking comes to fruition.

Link Bait

Having absolutely nothing to do with catching the biggest trout, link bait is a technique which focuses on content creation, and can come in such forms as video, blog entries, articles, blog postings, pictures or info-graphics. While some experts believe link bait to be a specific technique, others believe it’s a by-product of consistently producing quality content on your site. Link bait occurs when a piece of content is placed on a web page which has been designed for the specific purpose of gathering links from the maximum amount of sources—in other word the specific item is, in effect, the “bait” for attracting large numbers of visitors.

You’ve heard of sites or photos or videos going “viral,” and one extremely interesting page on your site can bring you a huge number of links once someone notices the page, shares the link, etc. Therefore, in theory at least, if you can write great content and submit it to the sites which will get it noticed, then hopefully for you the result is greatly increased traffic. Do a thorough research of your chosen topic and search for other sites which you think will be interested to share your content. Successful link bait will be content written with the intent to educate, it will be relevant and focused, and it will greatly exceed the expectations of your readers.

What is Widget Bait?

A widget is essentially a simple feature which can be added to websites and blogs by copying a snippet of code from one page and pasting into your own. One of the original widgets was the page view counters seen on eBay auctions. Generally speaking a widget will offer the user a specific function to the page it is imbedded in. Because inbound links are so incredibly important in the overall SEO wars, some sites have begun to use widget “bait” in an attempt to increase backlinks. The site develops and distributes widgets which include a link as part of the code you copy and paste.

Once you’ve added the widget, you are either knowingly or unknowingly linking out to the site which distributes the widget. Obviously there is abuse potential here, and, predictably, some are using extreme black hat widget bait. If the link is clearly visible, relevant to the site it links to, points to the page that provided the widget, is a single link rather than many and the anchor text is the name of the site being linked to, then you are safely in the white hat zone. If any or all of those things are not true, beware as Google could penalize you for what they consider unethical linking.

Do You Have Link Magnetism?

If your link campaign focuses on triggering both the emotions and the needs of your target audience through offering incentives as a method of gaining links, then you are engaging in link magnetism. If your goal is to become a link magnet, you must not only be extremely creative, but must clearly identify a problem in your niche, then develop a solution which is then offered as a “prize” to those to link to you. Like widget bait, there is the potential for misuse, so be careful when using this technique.

These three advanced link building strategies are really only the tip of the iceberg, however it can greatly benefit your site to try several new methods in order to see what works the best for your particular site.

SEO Optimization—On Page or Off Page?

March 14th, 2012

The battle continues to range as to whether on-page SEO is better than off-page SEO. If you are a bit fuzzy on exactly where the difference lies, off-page SEO generally refers to items which are outside your site—link generation programs and social media efforts to name just a couple. On-page SEO refers to the specific copy on your website, whether or not your website design is SEO friendly, and the code, title tags, meta descriptions, meta keywords and internal linking which appear on your website and are crucial to your site’s success.

On-page SEO is absolutely necessary in order for your website to reach its full potential, and truthfully, if you have a website which has been successfully live for several years, possesses very deep, well-structured, quality content, then a bit of tweaking may well be enough to make your website as successful as you desire. On the other hand, if your website is a relative newcomer to the Internet, then it is highly likely you are going to have to jump into the off-page factors if you want to be recognized as a quality site.

What Can On-Page SEO Do For You?

On-page SEO can enable each page within your website to rank highly for a particular, prominent keyword or key phrase. On-page SEO can allow you to prioritize which pages within your website are of higher importance based on their navigational structure and internal links. Finally, on-page SEO can give a page rank based on a portion of the links from off-page ranking factors.

What Can Off-Page SEO Do For You?

Off-page SEO can, to some extent, compensate for flaws within your site’s pages, as well as for less competitive keywords. Excellent off-page SEO can bring a brand new site to the first page in a Google search in a matter of weeks. Off-page SEO can keep your most important web pages at the top of the search engines by virtue of link quality and relevance, and finally, off-page SEO develops authority for your site and the pages within it.

Challenges of a New Site

If you have only recently launched your website, then there is a chance it may be lacking content as well as high quality links to your site. In order to develop your site’s SEO as quickly as possible, it’s imperative that you present exceptionally high-quality content which is of value to your readers rather than tons of marketing fluff. Blogs are an especially great way to create quick, meaningful content for your site’s visitors, and the best blogs gain quickly in popularity, bringing traffic in to your website. The more quality content on your site, the more likely readers will find something they want to link to, so consistent posting of great content is key.

Challenges of an Old Site Which is Largely Un-optimized

Suppose you have a relative older site which has never been thoroughly optimized even though it’s been on line for two, three, four or more years. Even better, assume this site has always had tons of quality content as well as authority with the search engines. Truth be told, you are sitting on the Hope Diamond of search engines. By simply tweaking your on-page SEO, and incorporating a relatively few off-page SEO techniques, you may soon find your site the rock star of the Internet.

Which is Better?

Many SEO experts believe that the best website rankings may come from mixture of approximately 60% on-page SEO tactics and 40% off-page SEO tactics, although in some cases links alone have been known to push a page straight to the top. The age and authority of your website, combined with the quality of your links as well as your supporting, high-quality content are all factors in determining how much time and energy you need to devote to on or off-page SEO.

SEO for Legal Bloggers

March 13th, 2012

Blogging can be one of the very best ways to connect your online business with your online users. Promoting your business becomes much easier and more streamlined once you implement blogging, not to mention your traffic should grow significantly. If you are familiar with the basic SEO tactics used to increase PageRank and traffic to your website, then many of the same techniques can be applied to your blog. There are, however, specific strategies which can be applied to your blog in order to boost both your traffic and ranking.

Optimize Your Blog Post Titles

Search engine optimization can be increased through the use of your blog post titles. If you are an avid newspaper reader, then you are aware of how you scan each page, stopping to read any article whose title attracts you. When you provide an interesting, appealing and attractive post title, you will essentially be persuading your reader to read through the entire blog posting. For maximum search engine optimization you should also include your top-ranked keywords in your post titles so search engines will pick them up more quickly.

Incorporate Top-rated Keywords

As most of us know, keywords play a crucial role in SEO, therefore every blogger should ensure they have identified their keywords and used them in the very best way. Keywords should also be sprinkled throughout the blog posting without appearing obvious. If you use your keywords judiciously throughout the title and posting, then Google will retrieve the article quickly, boosting your rankings.

Build a Network for Optimal SEO

Building a network for your blog will include providing backlinks, commenting in related niche blogs and using social media in ways such as creating a Facebook fan page. Social media is truly one of your greatest assets when building your blog network, so use it to your advantage.

Post Quickly and Post Often

If your blog centers around a specific niche, and that particular industry changes rapidly, you will want to keep your blog readers informed and up-to-date—before other bloggers in your niche get the information out there first. You want to be known as the blogger who informed your readers first about the latest trend, so make sure you keep up-to-date, then post quickly before others have had the chance.

Make sure you post at a minimum of three times per week as well to increase your overall search engine optimization, rankings and reader satisfaction. It can be very disappointing for a reader to finally find a blog which fits his or her needs, but is not updated frequently, and can lead readers to believe you can’t be bothered to put in the time necessary to promote your blog. Even if you are tapped out and can’t think of anything clever to say, you can always find something clever on Google.

Content is the Backbone of Your SEO Strategy

The old adage is correct, and content truly is king. While it may take you a bit longer to reach the top using organic SEO, the results will be well worth it. When you consistently offer high-quality, informative blog postings, your readers will loyally stick with you, and will also share your blog postings with others. Sharing is a very important strategy when building networks, and writing persuasive, quality, helpful content will help you get quality backlinks.

Work on each of these tips for increasing your SEO through your blog, and you will see significant results in a relatively short amount of time.

Promoting Your Site through Article Marketing

March 12th, 2012

While article marketing is not particularly complex, it does require two things—patience and persistence. The impact of a single article may never be particularly huge—although there are exceptions to this rule—therefore it’s the sheer quantity of quality articles you get out there along with the backlinks you receive back to your site. It’s important to look at the overall process of writing articles on a regular basis as a major campaign to slowly but surely bring in huge amounts of web traffic. Article marketing is an SEO strategy which has been around for years, but has remained a solid, trusted manner to drive traffic to your site and generate highly relevant one way links.

What Makes Up a Great Article?

Every article you write must be highly keyword-focused as well as being highly readable. If your reader is not convinced they should read through the article to the end, they will be unlikely to reach the resource box with your link. Before you begin writing, have a clearly defined goal for what you intend to accomplish. Think seriously about the image and brand you are building, and develop a message which revolves around your stated goals.

Make a comprehensive outline of your proposed article, making sure there is a clearly delineated beginning, middle and end. When you are outlining your article, think about what you want to leave your reader with, as well as the idea of leaving them anxious to read more or your articles, ensuring they will follow your link back to your site. Generally speaking, choose one particular keyword to focus on in each article, and use this keyword or keyword phrase in your article’s title, in the first paragraph once or twice and in the link text in your resource box.

What Does Article Marketing Accomplish?

When you are engaging in article marketing you are promoting yourself as a respected expert who can provide serious and innovative solutions and insights for problems which real people experience and need help with. When those same articles are also highly keyword focused your site’s link popularity can literally soar. When you use article marketing to generate revenue and increase traffic, more and more people will see your articles leading more clicks to your site.

Developing Contextual Links within Your Article

Embedded links within the articles you have targeted for article marketing gives them much more cache’ with the search engines while also establishing a good fan base for your site and your articles. In fact, you can create a huge group of people who adore your writing simply by promoting those articles which have many resources to offer to the reader. People who truly love your writing will begin to post your link on social media and bookmarking sites. Contextual links are, literally, links from your content. You gain back links by using targeted keywords, related hyperlinks or anchor text. Contextual linking requires high quality links and high quality content.

Some tips to help you develop good contextual links include taking care to check the page rank of any blog or site prior to accepting a link, and being cautious on the specific keyword phrases you choose. Getting a link from a top ranked page can greatly help your site, and developing strong contextual link building strategies through bookmarking and social media sites is also beneficial.

Article marketing can do more for your website than virtually any other single SEO technique, so it’s important to learn the specific techniques and incorporate them into your overall plan.

Promoting Your New Blog

March 9th, 2012

If you’ve recently decided to take the plunge into the world of blogs, you may be wondering how on earth you will promote that blog and make it as successful as possible. Blogs are often an extension of your business website, allowing you to increase your overall sales and profits. The goal of your online business website is obviously to get more and more traffic, thus more conversions. Blogs are a great tool for generating traffic, but even better, blogs help you keep that traffic as your readers will come back time and time again.

Blogging allows a two way flow of information; you get insights into your customer’s wants and needs, then you turn around and offer them the exact information they are looking for. If you keep your blog content high quality, informative and intriguing, you will grow an incredibly loyal audience who will then visit your website, turning into loyal customers. Take a look at the following tips, then try to incorporate at least one of them each week—you will soon see the fruit of your labors in incredibly increased traffic.

1. If you want to let specific search engines or other websites know each time you update your blog, you can ping your blog post. There are several popular pinging services such as Ping-o-Matic and Pingoat, which are both free and easy to use. It takes less than a minute to ping your latest blog posting, and this effort will attract the search engine spiders to your site, getting it indexed all the more quickly.
2. Use social media to your advantage. Make sure you set up profiles at the most popular social networking sites, including Facebook and LinkedIn, including the URL of your blog. Any time you update your blog, announce that update on your Facebook and Twitter pages. Even better, do this several times a day in order to reach every single person possible.
3. Do a Google search to find popular communities which are specific to your particular niche. Many of these websites will allow you to submit a link which will increase your traffic, plus you have the added bonus of building professional business relationships through these communities.
4. Comment on other people’s blogs, primarily those within your niche. Blog commenting can drive traffic from your comment to your blog, resulting in new readers and subscribers. Remember to avoid any type of “great post” blog comments. Take the time to actually read the blog posting and make sure your comment is thoughtful and even controversial, but reflects the fact that you spent time on another blog.
5. Use your chosen keywords often, although not in a contrived manner. Your keywords should appear in your blog post titles, your links and throughout your content in a natural way. Make sure your blog content is always high quality, and gives your readers something of value. Remember that blogging is not specifically about selling—although your hope is that your blog sends readers to your website—rather it is about educating and engaging your readers. Create an outline of sorts which encompasses your audience, your proposed topic and the keywords you want to incorporate into the posting, then use this outline to stay focused and on topic.

A few more tips: Brainstorm, making a list of ideas for your blog. Post a “definitive guide to….” whatever your blog niche is. Interview an interesting person in your area of expertise. Although you don’t have to blog every single day, at least try to stick to some sort of regular schedule so your readers know what to expect and when to check back. Write a guest posting for another blog—if you’re published you should see a spike in your own traffic. In short, don’t wait for others to stumble across your blog. Promote each and every one of your blog postings and you will soon see better search engine rankings, higher quality traffic and, eventually, an increase in traffic and conversions on your business website.

Planning and Tracking to Ensure the Most Efficient Link Building

March 8th, 2012

The two primary ways you will get increased web traffic are through links pointing to your website and improved search engine rankings—which can be obtained in part through lots of high-quality links. While there are dozens of ways to bring new links to your site, not all of them will be equally fruitful, and some will require much more time and patience. The trick is to find the most efficient mix of link building methods rather than focusing entirely on one method.

What Are the Most Efficient Ways to Build Links?

Of the many ways to create beneficial links to your website, the top honors go to article submission, directory submission, blog commenting, guest blogging and social bookmarking. Further down the list are link exchanging, buying links and the less-than-ethical black hat techniques and link baiting. The core principles of a successful link building campaign include structure as well as planning and tracking.

What Link Building Techniques Will Get Your Site Penalized?

Always treat link building with caution and respect, and realize that it is a gradual process which can render dynamic results if you persevere. On the flip side, there are some types of link building which can undo all your good work, nearly in one fell swoop. First and foremost, avoid building your link base through purchasing links, primarily because Google forbids it and will probably slap you with a penalty. Competitors can now report you for purchasing links through Google’s reporting tool, getting your site penalized or even banned. Google’s latest algorithm is much smarter at detecting paid links and even if you don’t get caught, paid links are hardly a long-term solution to bumping your site up the ranks.

Directory Link Building and Link Exchanges

While some still advocate using web directories for posting links, others believe they are outdated, and, frankly, not that useful. While you may use web directories in the beginning, try not to rely on this as your sole means of link building. Link exchanges, while potentially very beneficial, are not as favored as they once were. Just remember that exchanging links with sites which are as far down the ladder as you are is unlikely to offer any benefit to your site.

Strive for Multiple and Diverse Sources of Links

The more sources you have for your website’s links, the “safer” you are should some of them stop working in the future. You also don’t want Google to see that every one of your links come from the same few domains. A steady flow of fresh links is what you are aiming for to grow your visitor base and prove that your content is in high demand. Though it sounds tedious and time consuming—and likely will be—track your link results closely to avoid wasting your time and money on techniques which are not successful. Keep the best, cut the rest loose.

Focus on Anchor Text

The value of anchor text was originally largely ignored, but has gained popularity due to its success in increasing site ranking. Although Google’s latest algorithm has made anchor text somewhat less effective, it is still considered a time-honored way to create a successful link-building campaign. When you create links to your anchor text, you are effectively building backlinks for your most desired keywords as well as increasing the credibility of your site. The page which is pointed to by the anchor text is believed to be significantly relevant to most search engines as they not only consider the linked page, but also the page containing the anchor text.

Rather than jump in to link building for your website without any forethought, a well-planned out link building campaign with continuous tracking can ensure your website becomes one of quality and success.

Optimization to Decrease Bounce Rate

March 7th, 2012

Bounce rate refers to those people who visit a single page of your web site, quickly “bouncing” away without further exploration. If your site suffers from a high bounce rate, it means you are not grabbing your visitor’s attention, and offering something which entices them to stay. The “average” bounce rate is from 40-60%, although these numbers change according to the type of website. Informational websites have an average bounce rate of 35-55%, while blogs typically have a much higher bounce rate between 55-75%. Whatever type of website you currently have, if your bounce rate is over 60% you should definitely be concerned, and if it’s over 80%, you have a serious problem. You can easily check your bounce rate through the use of Google Analytics or a similar program.

Causes of a High Bounce Rate

There are a wide variety of reasons your users may be bouncing away from your site, and most all of them can be fixed with a little elbow grease and ingenuity.

• Slow loading pages may be a primary cause of website bounce. Our increasingly busy world dictates that users want the website they click on to load almost instantaneously, and if it doesn’t, they rarely wait around, clicking away to a site which will load quickly. Make sure your site isn’t so plastered with photos and other bells and whistles that it loads slowly on lower speed Internet connections. Also, you will need to determine whether the person who built your site might have worked in Google Chrome, failing to check the site’s performance in Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. Quite often a site which loads perfectly in one browser may struggle in another.

• A confusing site design can also leave your visitors frustrated and, well, gone. Your website should immediately convey trust as well as your core message and should be clearly organized, making it easy for your readers to navigate. While there are many ways to lay out your landing page, the right creative layout can be critical, and will take into account your specific product or service, your sales pitch and any additional information you feel is critical to your overall business theme. Depending on your specific product or service, you may need more text content or more visual content to build your credibility. Whatever your needs and the needs of your customer, keep your design simple, and don’t force your visitors to spend their valuable time searching for what they need. Put yourself in their place, and determine how you would want to find what you needed in the most expedient manner possible. Don’t lose traffic and revenue from a poor website design and eliminate distractions so your visitors can focus on your primary message.

• Make sure you are clear about your target customer—your goal is to target those people who are most likely to convert. Many websites unwittingly attract the wrong prospects, meaning the bounce rate goes up exponentially. You will use your keywords, content writing and landing page headlines to attract your ideal prospect, and when you have done that, there will be far fewer bounces away from your site. Once you’ve clearly identified your target customer, make sure you don’t unwittingly interrupt their experience on your site, which goes back to a clear, easy to use website design.

• Ensure there is a clear call to action on your site, and that you have provided the necessary path which leads to that action. Your landing page requires a concise next step, and informational sites will have a call to action on the home page. Make sure you are using your chosen keywords in the best way possible. Many times a search for a specific term leads the user to a site which is note even remotely what they had in mind. Highly searched, generic keywords are useless in the end if you are not providing what those people are searching for, and can be a significant cause of a high bounce rate.

Lowering your bounce rate may take some hard work, but the results are well worth it. Start small, expanding bit by bit, and reviewing your results along the way.

Off-Page SEO Tactics

March 6th, 2012

Off page SEO encompasses all the things you can do to get your site a high PageRank once it has gone live. As the name indicates, off page SEO is done outside the actual pages of your site, and most off page SEO concerns building your link popularity. Backlinks are the backbone of your link popularity since the higher the link popularity, the higher the PageRank. Your goal will be to slowly but surely increase the number of high quality websites which link to your website.

This is not the same as reciprocal linking or link exchanging where you contact another webmaster and offer to link to their site if they will link to yours, but is rather gaining unilateral links—those quality sites which link to your site due only to the excellence of your site. The best way to garner unilateral links is to consistently offer unique, informative and quality content. You may be wondering just how to accomplish this through content alone.

Article Marketing
There are literally thousands of article directories on the Internet where you can submit your articles. Each article submission gains you a resource box where you are allowed to introduce yourself and—most importantly—share a link to your site. The problem here is making sure you only submit to high quality article directories which have high page ranking. Once your articles are accepted they will be included in the directory’s pages, in turn increasing your own PageRank. The more quality directories you submit your articles to, the more links to your website. Although it can sound daunting, there are article directory submission services, some which are relatively inexpensive. Make sure to include keywords and links within your articles to add additional SEO value to advertisers.

Unique Headlines and Clear, Direct Information
Try not to repeat your titles in your subtitles, and keep your articles between 400 and 800 words. Remember that for easy web readability, you need to use smaller chunks of text, divide into smaller paragraphs with headings, and use bulleted or numbered lists. Offer your visitors a read which is truly valuable and gives them much-needed information for the time involved. Work hard to ensure your titles are as unique as possible, then use your articles to contain links to promoted blog articles, as well as hosted content on social networking sites.

Try Triangular Linking Rather Than Reciprocal
Google is not always a fan of reciprocal linking, however you can get around this restriction a bit by trying triangular linking. To do this successfully, find two or more other webmasters who are amendable to linking with you—as well as the others—then you post a link to site B, B posts a link to site C, and so on. The principle is essentially the same as link exchanges, but the search engine spiders have not caught on to this technique just yet.

Social Bookmarking as SEO Tactic
Spreading the good word about your website as thoroughly as possible generally includes socializing your web content. Providing your site contents through RSS feeds, and establishing your site through the news and media brings additional links to your site. Social media sites which have high authority with the search engines are an excellent off-page SEO tactics. Once you post your site content on various social media sites through blog posting, quality backlinks will start coming your way. In order to garner deep, inbound links, your readers should be encouraged to use bookmarking websites throughout your site.

Off page SEO is critical to the ultimate success of your site, sending it up the page ranks. As long as you continually monitor and adjust your off page SEO tactics, your site can remain in an enviable position, leaving you a satisfied webmaster.