Off Page SEO

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Off Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

In SEO terms, Off Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to a large group of factors – outside of your website’s content – used by search engines in the evaluation of your website’s pages. Off Page SEO is very different from On Page SEO because you have considerably less direct control over it. For example, if you wanted to change a webpage’s title (On Page SEO), that’s fairly simple. If you wanted 100 more deep links from highly trusted, relevant websites (and you do want this part of Off Page SEO), it is much more difficult.

In short, Off Page Search Engine Optimization includes elements like:

• Inbound Links to your Website’s pages (Backlinks)
  • Quality of Links
  • Quantity of Links
  • Which Pages they Link to
  • Age of Links
  • Anchor Text of Inbound Links
  • Linking Relationship (i.e. One Way, Reciprocal or Exchange, Three Way, etc.)
• Your Website’s PageRank
• Age of your Website
• Your Website Domain Expiration Date

PageRank Defined

To begin this Off Page SEO discussion, let’s start by defining PageRank. Developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co founders of Google, PageRank is essentially a mathematical algorithm that, at its most simplistic level, calculates an index for a particular webpage page on its inbound and outbound (if any) links.

Google’s PageRank, which incidentally, is named after Larry Page – not for a webpage’s “rank”, defines PageRank as:

PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.

PageRank is shown on a scale from 0 to 10. It is a logarithmic scale, so a PageRank of 6 is 10 times greater than a PageRank of 5, subsequently PR 6 is 100 times greater than a PageRank of 4, and so on.

There are two types of PageRank. One that you see on the Google Tool Bar as a green bar reporting 0 through 10 (or not ranked) and a second that is what Google really uses – you don’t know what that is. Google is just one element, not the only element that goes into ranking a website in search engine results.

Off Page SEO – Inbound Links to Your Site

Links to your site are a very important part of Off Page Search Engine Optimization. They are also an important source of traffic as well as a barometer of the value of your traffic. I will cover inbound links in more detail later, but here’s a quick overview of what’s important.

Inbound Link Quality: The higher the quality of the link, the better. So how is quality defined? In this case, some adjectives I would use to define link quality are: Authority, Anchor Text, Relevance, Trust and PageRank. Find sites to link with you that meet these criteria and you are on your way. Anchor text with your targeted keywords help significantly.

Inbound Link Quantity: Generally speaking, the more the better, however search engines calculate link value, so lots of poor quality or spammy links can either hurt you, not help you or only marginally help you.

Other Inbound Link Factors: In general, search engines are looking for a natural linking pattern – and they are getting smart. So things like trading links, which webpages within your site are generating links, the anchor text other sites use to link to your website, and so on.

Off Page SEO – The Age of your Website

Another element of Off Page Search Engine Optimization is the age of your website. Older is better, in most cases. What you are looking for is an older, well trusted, established domain. This translates to higher trust and suggests your website is not transient or a throw-away website.

Off Page SEO – Domain Expiration

Similar to age of your website, if your domain registration is set to expire within less than a year, it suggests transiency or instability. Register your website domain or domains for at least two years and don’t wait until the last minute to renew it.

Off Page Search Engine Optimization – Summary (SEO)

If you have gotten this far, hopefully you have already read my webpages on Search Engine Optimization, the SEO Introduction and On Page SEO. Off Page Search Engine Optimization and generating quality Inbound Links is perhaps the most important element of your SEO endeavor, presuming you’ve already done everything else correctly. Of course, a high PageRank won’t hurt either! Contact Marketing Practicality to improve the quality of your website, your Off Page SEO and your rankings.