Off-Page Search Engine Optimisation
From RKJOnline Web Design, Cheshire
The most important factor in getting your website high in search engines like Google
We’ll be blunt about this – the power of off-Page SEO is often under-rated by new website owners, mostly because it certainly can be tricky to understand why doing things away from your website is going to help your website’s Google ranking. So RKJOnline Web design will always thoroughly explain this issue to our clients and then, as always, let them make up their own minds!
Votes of confidence for your web pages
Remember we talked about Google’s need for Relevance and
Importance? Well off-page SEO is very much about the importance/authority of the web-pages
in your website. If those web-pages can attract “votes of confidence” from the overall Internet family, due
to their importance and authoritative content, then your website ranking in Google will improve.
One of the crucial ways of attracting “votes of confidence” is getting back-links to your website and much about the detailed off-page SEO services we offer is to do with the different ways of attracting those back-links, those votes.
One thing we want to point out first, however, is that unquestionably the best way you can attract links to your website is to have wonderful, informative, fresh content on the page! Have the “wow” factor that makes other visitors want to share your website from their own.
RKJOnline: Off-Page SEO Services
(Click to go to specific topic)
- Back-Link campaign
- Press Releases – creation and distribution
- Rapid Indexing Techniques
- Competitor Analysis (influences on-page decisions)
- Blogs – creation, commenting
- “Do-follow” forums
- Video promotion (YouTube)
- Business Reviews
- Article submissions on behalf of the client
- Questions & Answers e.g. Yahoo!
Just a quick note that other “votes of confidence for the web-pages themselves” can be gained via Social Media – which is a very important and fast growing aspect of SEO. Go to our “additional SEO services“ page to find out why.
Back-Link Campaign – getting those votes
of confidence for your website
As we discussed above, links are votes for your website and the more votes you get, the more Google is impressed! You can attract links by having fresh, good quality content that others will want to share with their own website's visitors and social media contacts.
However, finding ways of generating good, fresh content is only part of the overall strategy and having a “back-link” campaign is pretty essential in gaining those votes of confidence. It is something your SEO consultant will deal with and make no mistake, it is very time consuming, needs to be done steadily over a period of time and won’t give instant results.
We will find and explore the online community associated with your specific business and target customers. We’ll network with them and we’ll build a list of link prospects.
The nature of any back-link campaign must be varied and balanced; with links coming from good quality websites within your niche. Rest assured that all of our link-earning practices are “White Hat”. We would never pay for a link – this is like a red flag to a bull where Google is concerned and if caught doing this, your website could be suspended indefinitely.
Not all “votes” through links count the same; get a vote from an education website (i.e. ".edu") for example, then because of the authoritative nature of the website – this link will count more than a link from a small local business site.
One-way links to your website are worth more in terms of helping your ranking than links that are “reciprocal” i.e. returned links – but how many website owners do you know who are willing to give something away for nothing?
Get the anchor text right.
Another important factor is the words used in the actual link back to your website – the words that will
be clicked to get to the specific web page that is hyper-linked. You’ll understand by now that your
SEO consultant must be targeting the most appropriate keywords about your business in various aspects
of SEO – especially the “on-page” SEO tactics.
The words used to link back to your website are called the “anchor text”. Let’s say you sell office furniture and you want a link from another website to go to your office chairs page. You are a company called “123 office furniture” based in Bradford. Well instead of the link back to your website saying something like “click here”, it could say “buy office chairs in Bradford”. That’s far more informative and chances are that “office chairs” and “Bradford” are keywords your website is trying to optimise for.
This link back to On-Page SEO is a hyperlink with the anchor text “On-Page SEO” – get the picture?
Anchor text enhances the relevance of the web-page it points to in the eyes of the search engines – and you know by now how important “Relevance” is to Google.
Monitoring your links is something we’ll do usually on a quarterly basis. We want to keep track of the quantity and quality of links you have and we also want to check that webmasters who have promised to link to your website have kept their word and not pulled the link over time.
Press Releases – Creation and Distribution
RKJOnline are professional copywriters – that kind of gives us a bit of an advantage over some of our competitors! When it comes to writing press releases, we have plenty of experience.
Press Releases are just one way of getting back-links to your website as well as having good off-page internet (and hardcopy) marketing qualities in their own right.
Thousands of press releases are written and distributed across the internet daily so how is one about YOUR Company going to stand out from the crowd?
Here are RKJOnline Web Design thoughts on press releases:
- They MUST be newsworthy – a new company launch, a new range, expansion, a new website etc.
- They must be written with the reader in mind, i.e. be informative for your customers, the press room etc. and contain great copy
- They must be SEO-friendly; we know the tricks of the trade to make an online press release optimised for your keywords
- They must contain links to your website
- They must be written in 3rd person perspective to make them more interesting and clickable
- They must have a “note to Editor” to help build trust – with some information about the company or individuals in question
- They must be distributed via online distribution services and via email to individuals at local newspapers, magazines etc.
We’ll ensure thorough distribution of your Press Release via free online services. The option to upgrade and pay for other online distribution services is always available.
Rapid Indexing Techniques
As Brad Callen, SEO guru put it:
“Google is not looking for you, your website, or your content… EVER!”
When your website goes online at “go-live”, Google does not know it exists – why should it?!
Google has something called “Googlebots” – also known as a robots, bots, or spiders – that crawl all over the web and discover new and updated pages of websites. These are then added to the Google Index. One cannot force Google to crawl a particular site and so when a website is new, customers are warned that it may take some weeks for Google to find and index their site.
When a customer searches Google for a product or service, it is to the Index that Google goes to match that information and “serve” a result (give the customer a list of relevant web-pages). In other words when you perform a Google search you are not searching the entire web at that moment in time – you are searching Google’s Index of the web.
If your website is not in Google’s index, it can't be ranked because Google doesn’t know your site (or the keyword rich content within it) exists. So, in order to rank in Google, you must first get into their index. Once your website is in the index and you do a search, you will appear in the search results – but exactly WHERE will depend on how good the content and the SEO is!
It also follows that when you add new content (which you should do to attract the search engines), Google does not know this exists until it re-indexes the site or more specifically re-indexes that particular page. If it’s a new page then Google has to find it for the first time before that content can help influence your rankings.
This is what Google says:
“In the simplest terms, you could think of searching the web as looking in a
very large book with an impressive index telling you exactly where everything is located. When you
perform a Google search, our programs check our index to determine the most relevant search results
to be returned ("served") to you.”
RKJOnline Web Design enlists a number of “rapid index techniques” to nudge Google into going to YOUR website and crawling it.
We do this specifically:
- When we build the site, through good thought-out internal page navigation. Without this Google may not even crawl some of your web pages at all and they therefore will not be indexed
- At go live, through XML site maps – see more info on our “additional SEO” page
- When the website is still new, because we don’t want Google to take weeks before finding it; we will encourage Google to follow links to your website sent via (for example) social media
- When there is new content added to an existing website; again because Google could take a long time to find it and in the meantime it won’t show that new page or content in a search result until it has been crawled – again we’ll use social media links to encourage Google to follow back to your new content but remember that simply by frequently having informative, quality, fresh content on your website, Google will be encouraged to crawl the website more frequently
- When we action the back-links campaign for your website; we will ensure back-links are set up not just to your Home page but to all your pages. If you look at natural organic listings, where a website has good SEO – including rapid indexing techniques – you’ll notice not just the home page is listed. As more of your internal web pages get indexed by Google, the greater the probability they’ll get listed in the natural listings. Our clients know that one aim of RKJOnline is to fill page one of Google with all your web pages appearing in the listing, along with your facebook, Linked-In and online directory pages being listed as well – pushing your competitors further into page 2 and beyond!
With regard to encouraging Google to crawl your website via following links, again, look at what Brad Callen has to say:
"Consider a Google spider a car and links as a road. Google spiders follow the path of links, pointing to your site, to discover new content. And because of that, content that is heavily linked to OR linked in areas which more Google spidering occurs get found much more rapidly."
There is also a view that the +1 GOOGLE BUTTON may help with rapid indexing – Google may crawl or re-crawl in response to a +1 Button being clicked.
When you become our client and take our SEO services, we’ll explain in more detail to you what we would like to do with Social Media, Google +1 and our other techniques to get your new website or web content indexing fast!
Competitor Analysis
(influences on-page decisions)
There is a lot to be learned from competitors in your niche who are doing well. Off-page, we can research why your competitors are performing well in the search engine ranking, analyse their techniques and discover if we can emulate anything that’s working well for them.
Some of the things we would analyse are:
- Their On-Page SEO in terms of keywords, meta tags, headings, url structure etc.
- How good their HTML is
- How their on-page navigation is set up
- Their content – are they regularly updating it with fresh content to attract visitors and links?
- Do they concentrate mostly on brand or website optimisation with their new content?
- What are their calls to action and are they working?
- Are all their web pages indexed?
- What back-links they have to their web-pages and where they come from; what the quality of the back-links is like, the quality and page-rank of the pages they come from and the anchor text in use; any “no-follows”?
- What types of links are they attracting – are they via forums, blogs, social media; can we tell if they are buying links?
- Are they getting customer reviews? Are they good or bad? Where are the reviews? (In some cases good customer reviews can influence where you appear in Google)
- Have they had an online directory campaign?
We’ll review these once a quarter and it’s possible that what we learn may help us tweak both on-page and off-page SEO for your website.
Blogs – creation**, commenting
(** Note: the addition of blog is not included in the SEO charge.)
One way of attracting more Search Engine traffic is to have a blog under your site.
By their very nature, blogs contain wonderful fresh content that Google loves, every time a new blog is posted. Plus of course you’ll incorporate relevant keywords in your blog posts which will help the search engines find you when people search for your service or product. The blog will attract visitors who are interested in your niche and also people who want to comment on your blog.
More traffic CAN help with more sales but it’s not guaranteed. But visitors to your blog will be given the opportunity to share your blog address via social media – creating lots of lovely links to your blog/website and hopefully lots of interest among the people seeing the link who in turn could visit the blog. Plenty of visitors are another thing Google loves to see, especially if they hang around on the blog for a while, earning you Google brownie points.
RKJOnline will submit your blog to the best blog directories, again creating super one-way links back to your site.
Guest Blogging for Back-links.
This is one of the best ways to achieve back-links to websites. The trick is to pick a good
quality website which allows guest bloggers, as this will help with the quality of back-link
achieved. Plus you’ll be doing the website owner a favour as they’ll be no doubt looking for
fresh content to please both their visitors and the search engines.
When RKJOnline Web Design in Cheshire look for websites like this we’ll be aiming to post good quality articles appropriate to the website theme. This is where you, the client comes in, as you know far more about your industry and brand than we do. We’ll ask or a short, quality article or perhaps something like a “Top Ten” list and we’ll ensure these go onto a quality blog which will then increase your company profile and gain quality back-links to your website, increasing the authority of your own website.
“Do-follow” forums
Using “do follow” forums to add posts and comments and then make use of the option to add back-link’s in the signature area, is a great way of getting back-links to your website BUT this must be done within the rules and guidelines of the forum i.e. we must follow White Hat SEO techniques.
In this way we also increase traffic to your website and help your ranking – as well as potentially getting new customers who may in turn share your website via social media buttons with plenty of other people – increasing traffic and so the circle goes on.
DOFOLLOW simply means that Google counts the links as valid links to your website; making posts and links within a NOFOLLOW forum is a waste of time for SEO purposes.
Finding appropriate forums for your niche is time consuming; RKJOnline will find these for you and where appropriate make a post with a back-link to your site. Where we don’t have the expertise in your particular niche or industry to make a viable comment, we will bring your attention to the forum question and ask for feedback, which we can then post for you. If you have time to provide it then it can earn you a valuable back-link and potential traffic to your site.
Video promotion (YouTube)
Currently YouTube is the 2nd most used Search Engine in the world – just one below Google (who own it). So where you may have videos posted, it makes sense to try to raise your organic ranking from your YouTube videos.
Let’s be clear on videos, you may believe now there is no way you’d produce a video to do with your business, but if, for example, you have a Google Places account (see “additional SEO”) then it’s imperative to make use of the video field in there for your Google Places ranking. This does not have to be a feature film! A short 30-second video of a product or a description of your service is all that is needed here.
Keywords are as usual critical for SEO in YouTube videos; there is a Title and Description field, not dissimilar to that we mention under “On-Page SEO” although for YouTube we recommend ensuring your website url is included and most people do this at the start of the description. There is also the opportunity to add tags, which we recommend (around 5 – 10 per video).
Links: as per website content, getting links to your video is a bonus and for YouTube this is described as having “link partners”. A great way of doing this is by using the techniques you would do for back-links to your website, so finding a way to mention the video in blogs, forums, articles, press releases etc. – but remember to keep these relevant to the business niche.
You can also respond to a video by linking another video to it – another way of creating relevance but don’t overdo this as it may come across as “spammy”.
Of course for those watching the video, there is the opportunity to share and comment via facebook and Twitter – creating lovely back-links to it and also free publicity!
RKJOnline will take all these actions on behalf of our clients who have videos that can be uploaded to YouTube and we would certainly encourage videos of your products and services as great for internet marketing and SEO.
Business Reviews
Online business reviews are the modern day “word of mouth”, especially when given via social media, as the number of potential new customers they can reach is phenomenal.
The best way to get a business review is to simply ask your customers – but then be able to offer them a variety of ways to provide that review, ways that would suit them best.
Reviews given via email can be edited into your website, making some fresh content and helping to build the trust between you and the website visitor. If you have added social media share buttons then visitors can share that new content and also comment on it – through facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
A review section can be added to your business facebook page, available for all your fans to see and of course you can then repeat that review in a wall post, sharing with fans and going into their news feed.
But for the purposes of SEO, the best reviews to get are those from:
- Google Places
- Online directory listings
Google loves to see the business that you have entered into Google Places also appearing all over the web, and online directories are one way of doing this. Where reviews are possible in those directories, they not only build trust with the person viewing that listing but they act as “citations”, helping to provide brownie points to your Google Places ranking. So yes, through online business reviews (good OR bad), your Google Places ranking can improve!
Don’t be concerned over a bad review; online you are generally able to respond to reviews. It says a lot about the character of the business owner to respond openly to a negative review, stating what they are going to do to rectify the situation. Respect can be gained in this way, so it’s not all bad!
Suffice to say that RKJOnline can handle the prompting and administering of online reviews where our client already has a website, a facebook page, a LinkedIn account, a Google Places account, and online directory listings. We can also effect responses our clients want to give to those reviews.
However please read more about Google Places and online directory listings in our “additional SEO” section.
Article submissions on behalf of the client
We have already mentioned the benefit of posting articles to blogs and whilst submitting articles to online “ezines” has waned somewhat recently, there is still a place for good quality articles posted online in a non-spam way.
What we have to avoid is article duplication – this is frowned on by Google and the article will only be counted once in terms of a great link back to your website. Hence RKJOnline web design use only manual submission methods where we input your article according to the rules and of an individual article submission site. We can also ensure that keyword-friendly anchor text is used for the link.
Not only can you make a name for yourself as an expert in your field and you gain valuable back-links to your site but invariably there is again the option for the reader to share the article – and hence your back-link – with their social media friends, potentially bringing even more traffic to your website.
Questions & Answers e.g. Yahoo!
Providing answers to questions about your niche industry online not only boosts your reputation but can get you additional website traffic as you will leave a valuable back-link to your website in the answer.
Yahoo! and facebook are 2 of the most well-known question and answer online sites. Needless to say, questions must be about your niche field, you must follow all rules and guidelines and you should leave a website link only if that site will provide more useful info on that subject.
How do you know whether there are questions out there for you to answer? Well of course RKJOnline will monitor this for you, advise you of any relevant questions and – should you provide an answer – post it for you online!
