Offpage optimization is now the main focus of many a webmaster and search engine optimisation expert when it comes to trying to boost the rankings of a website in the leading search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. Offpage optimisation is all about getting as many valuable links to your website as possible in the most natural way (or at least in a way which will appear natural to search bots) possible.
This week I started to do a bit of offpage optimisation for the SEO tools section of the website, this is only a new section which was put live in mid May with the overall site relaunch and thus it does not have pagerank or any links pointing to it yet. Considering all this then it’s not surprising that for the term ’seo tools’ the SEO tools section of the akamarketing.com website is currently ranked 68th on Google and nowhere to be seen on either Yahoo or MSN, now I know that with time the rankings would have improved, but I decided to do offpage optimisation anyhow as I know this term is competitive. I’m guessing I will have to wait for three or four months though before I can reap any rewards in terms of higher search engine rankings.
OK so let’s continue with what I actually did. My method of offpage optimisation was to submit one of my articles to a couple of sites which regularly publish my work as well as submitting that same article to a couple of other sites which I found through my old friend Google. Most of you reading this will know that the main advantage of publishing your articles on other webmasters sites is the fact that you will be allowed to include a link back to your website via the resource box which comes at the end of the articles. Often this link can be keyword rich which has HUGE benefits in terms of search engine optimisation.
After submitting my article to the sites which regularly publish my work I began the search for fresh sites to try and expand the reach of my article. I found sites which would potentially publish my work by performing certain special searches on Google, examples of these include; “internet marketing intitle:submit your article” , “search engine optimization intitle:submit your article”, “internet marketing inurl:submitarticle”, ”online marketing intitle:addarticle”, “seo articles intitle:articlesubmit”. These are just a handful of the different variations of searches which I performed. I basically used the inurl: and intitle: advanced search syntax along with keywords related to the article which I wanted other webmasters to publish on their sites. The words in bold are samples of the keywords I used, these words do of course change based on the topic of the article.
Run any of the above queries in Google yourself and you will see a load of sites which could potentially publish your article, this is what I done. After scanning each result for a second or so I visited any of the decent looking ones to try and submit my articles. The various search queries which I used were so specific that a large percentage of the results would indeed allow me to submit my article, excellent.
Simple enough stuff from here in really, I basically just copied and pasted my article (along with one of my resource boxes) into a load of different websites form interfaces and hit the submit button. The only thing I really had to think about was what resource box I was going to use. Let me continue, basically I had four resource boxes, the reason I had four resources boxes was not to do with the normal text as such but it was to do with the actual linking text back to my site (or more specifically the seo tools page located at http://www.akamarketing.com/seo-tools/). One of the resource boxes had a standard issue link to the seo tools section while the other three contained different keyword rich links to the seo tools section. Finding out whether or not a site will allow HTML resource boxes (and thus keyword rich backlinks) can be done by simply looking at other articles which are already on the site or pressing the preview button (which many sites have) and seeing if a keyword rich link comes out correctly, if it does you can be almost certain that HTML is allowed in the resource box.
One of the resource boxes then is for sites that don’t allow HTML, but why did I need three HTML keyword rich resources boxes. Well the reason I had three keyword rich resource boxes is to allow my incoming links to appear as natural as possible (remember I mentioned this near the end of the first paragraph?). Imagine Google indexed 30 new incoming links to my SEO tools page all with the exact string ’seo tools’ as the anchor text, it certainly won’t appear natural as different webmasters will of course use different variations of words to describe the same page, it’s very unlikely that all 30 webmasters would use the exact same string to describe what’s on the other side of the link so if Google sees something like this it will perhaps discount or even discard a whole load of links as something unnatural (like effectively ‘paying’ for a link with an article) is going on. This is the reason I used three different HTML resource boxes.
The different anchor texts I used in my resource boxes where ’seo tools’, ’search engine tools’ and ’search engine optimization tools’. When I submitted my articles I simply alternated my resource boxes so that the backlinks I would gradually acquire (as Google finds its way around all the sites which published my article) would appear just as if a webmaster had chosen the link text himself or herself thus making the link text more ‘believable’ and valuable.
In terms of results so far, well as mentioned above I only submitted my article earlier this week and I was quite conservative in relation to the amount of sites I submitted to but already a couple of pages which have my article on them have been picked up in Google and MSN (Yahoo is a good bit slower I believe). The title of the article was “How to create content that will get you loads of links“ and an exact string search for it on Google and MSN returns 157 and 34 results respectively. Have a look through some of the results and notice that there’s a good mix of the various anchor texts which differentiate all my resource boxes from each other.
Well there you have it, I’m sure you will agree that my efforts earlier this week constituted a simple enough method of offpage optimisation, I can confirm though that it is one of the most effective methods and yes I am speaking from experience. Be sure to check my rankings for ’seo tools’ in a couple of months (after all these new pages with my link on them have ’settled’ in the index and have obtained some pagerank), I’d be very surprised if I’m not in the top 20 or so results. Any questions about anything in this post please don’t hesitate to drop me a comment.
