Off site SEO involves anything that isn’t located on your own website.

In essence, that means links pointing back to your website.

Those links can take many forms and can be in many different places – we’ll take a look at the more common ones here plus some caveats (yes, there are always exceptions!)

Links can take many different forms but the most common are:

• Follow/no follow. This is a tag that Google and other search engines take note of but is misleading because, at first glance, you’d think the search engines wouldn’t crawl the link that’s being pointed at. But they do. Mainly because it’s actually designed to tell the search engines that it’s to be ignored for purposes of page rank calculations. So, despite what you may read on forums or in books, don’t worry about whether your links are follow or nofollow.
• Plain text links – often found in forums or on web pages where the software doesn’t automatically convert them into clickable links. These are still counted as a link and you can highlight them in most browsers and treat them as though they are a “real” link.
• Anchor text. Not strictly a link type but it makes sense to talk about it here. This is the clickable text used for the highlighted link. This can take the form of a regular URL (with or without http at the start) or your site name or the keywords you’re targeting or even the keywords someone else is targeting (as can be seen from various experiments that get published from time to time). I’ll talk about what can be in this text later.

Some links are under your control – for instance, things like forum signatures or articles you’ve written for sites like EzineArticles.

Other links are partially under your control – for instance, the links you put below a YouTube video.

And other links happen because other people think that your site is worth linking to.

Google and the other search engines will take account of your off site SEO and use what they find to decide where to place you in the search results for a particular keyword phrase.

Which is where the less scrupulous internet marketers will try to manipulate what’s happening.

As a general rule, if a tactic sounds spammy, it probably is.

Which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work at the moment. But it does mean that the loophole is likely to get plugged at some stage and then you’re left with lots of less-than-good backlinks pointing to your site that may be doing it more harm than good.

Each backlink has a different value (sometimes called weight).

All other things being equal (which they rarely are), the more important the search engines think the page with the backlink is, the more weight will be given to those backlinks.

Which explains why people selling backlinks (not something that Google are fans of) charge more if the Page Rank of the page with the link is high.

And, of course, it’s not quite that simple.

Roughly speaking, the more links there are on a page, the less value each link will carry.

Again, don’t worry too much about all this because Google are looking for a “natural” pattern of links. So they expect your pages to have links of varying quality pointing to them. Because that’s a lot more natural than all links coming from high Page Rank pages or whatever.

Best practice #1

If you have influence over it, vary the “anchor text” of your links.

That’s not necessarily easy – on a forum signature, you’ll have the same text on all your posts – but is worth aiming for in places such as article directories where you do have influence.

Again, don’t lose sleep over this. There’s no perfect mix of anchor texts. But for those places where you can influence the text, vary it from time to time.

Best practice #2

Be a good neighbour.

That means don’t leave meaningless comments on other people’s blogs, just for the sake of a backlink.

It also means linking out from your website or blog when appropriate.

So if you find a resource or website that would be useful, link to it – even if it doesn’t earn you any money!

It’s generally worth avoiding gigs on sites like Fiverr that offer silly numbers of backlinks for a few dollars. Almost all the time, you get even less value than you paid. Most of the gigs that offer more than a handful of backlinks either use automated methods or are economical with the truth when telling you what they’re offering – most of the time, you need a high level degree in reading between the lines to work out what’s actually being offered.

Best practice #3

Don’t use spun articles.

Even the best “spun” articles are rubbish.

Best practice #4

Don’t worry about duplicate content on sites other than your own.

Duplicate content – the same (or near enough the same) words on several different pages – isn’t recommended on your own site but happens all the time across different sites.

Think of all the results for things like song lyrics or major news events. They’re often word-for-word identical. And it’s perfectly normal for that to be the case.

Conclusion

Off site SEO is something you can influence but not control.

Most of the time, the search engines are smart enough to realise that.

And those times when the search engines don’t get it quite right usually get picked up and publicised by geeks with too much time on their hands and corrected an update or two later.

Do something most days, weeks or months to generate at least one or two backlinks to your site.

This can be as simple as participating in a relevant forum, posting an article on somewhere like EzineArticles, putting up a video, Tweeting, etc.

Backlinks don’t get counted immediately – it takes time for the search engines to realise that new links exist and then yet more time for them to assign importance to them – but they do get taken into consideration for off site SEO.

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