INTERNET MARKETING ARTICLES

by Andrew Plimmer

As a new website owner, champing at the bit to get visitors, you may be wondering where they all are to begin with. A good web development company will optimise your website generically as a matter of good practice so that the search engines – when they find you – know what your website is about. However, it’s still up to you to tell the internet world that your website is there. When it comes to growing your business or company website and increasing its popularity with the search engines in terms of search engine results placement (SERPs) as well as PageRank (PR) there are several factors that are considered important. You may know what basic search engine optimisation is, and this is the process of improving the quality of traffic to your website.

However, once your website has been optimised onsite with keywords in all the right places, you’ll need to start off-site SEO. This is crucial and necessary to achieving a friendly status with search engines, thus giving you higher and higher search engine results placements (SERPs) so that your customers and visitors will be able to find you. Off-site search engine optimisation (SEO) is necessary; if you don’t use it then you can liken it to trying to grab the search engines’ attention while having one hand tied behind your back. This is how important it is, and there are several ways to go about off-site SEO techniques.

Linkbuilding and Backlinks

The ultimate way to improve your SEO efforts is to increase your linkbuilding campaign. The way this works is by obtaining as many quality backlinks as you can for your website. A backlink is when you have another website that has a link pointing back to your site. This link from the other website is often thought of as a “vote” for your website. This vote signals the search engines, which in turn put your website in a more favourable light, thus pushing you further up in the search engine.

How to Get Backlinks

There are several ways to go about getting backlinks, and in relation to off-site SEO these techniques do take some hard work and dedication.

Article Writing and Submissions – This off-site SEO technique involves writing an informational, attention-grabbing article on a certain topic and submitting it to large article directories. For example, if you’re in the customer service industry then you could write an article on “5 sure-fire ways to make customers like you” or a related title.

The important part about this process is that when you submit articles to article e-zines and article directories then you are allowed to include a link that goes directly to your site. This increases the number of backlinks that you have, especially if you’re writing lots of great articles and submitting them to multiple article e-zines and directories.

Getting backlinks from large article directories is a good strategy to use, but an even better one involves getting a backlink from a website owner that has relevant and similar information as is posted on your site. Relevancy is crucial when it factors into off-site SEO so having a related website, such as from a website owner who owns the same type of business as you, give you a backlink would be powerful search engine food. However, these often require you to post their link on your website in return – a link exchange. For various reasons to do with Page Rank this can work well but ask yourself, do you really want your website’s visitors to be directed elsewhere?

Forum Postings – In forums, you’re routinely allowed to have a forum signature, which can be used to post a link back to your website. The more posts you have, the more backlinks you have. Of course, you want to make sure that you post great and useful information which would boost your authority as well.

All in all, these are only a few of the major techniques that can help with your off-site SEO. As mentioned, all of this takes time and dedication to do, but once you have started and have seen the results for your website then chances are that you’ll only be motivated more to continue with your off-site SEO efforts.

Andrew Plimmer is CEO of Suncoast Internet, SEO Sunshine Coast, web design and web development specialists. For more information on Internet Marketing go to:
http://www.suncoastinternet.com.au