15 Great Off-Page SEO Techniques, seo tips, one page and off page seo tips,

There are many people who are just starting to blog and many more that have run their own site for a while, that don’t know what SEO is and how to implement it!

SEO simply stands for Search Engine Optimisation. This is where you construct your web pages and implement certain techniques to help you rank as high as possible on search engine result pages (SERPs). The higher your pages can rank on Google/Bing/Yahoo/etc. results pages, the more traffic your site is likely to get.

Now, SEO can be split up into two separate categories; On-Page SEO & Off-Page SEO.

On-Page SEO refers to all the things that you can do ON your website to help you rank higher, such as page titles, internal linking, meta tags & descriptions, etc.

Off-Page SEO refers to all the things that you can do directly OFF your website to help you rank higher, such as social networking, article submission, forum & blog marketing, etc.

In today’s post we will be looking specifically at Off-Page SEO and some of the most effective ways to increase your page rankings on search engines.

What is over optimization?

Over Optimization happens when your website is considered "too good" by Google - either in terms of a sudden volume of backlinks, or because of heavy on-page optimization. In other words, if Google considers that your website optimization is beyond acceptable limits , your website will be red-flagged and automatically restricted or penalized.
There is a fine line between over optimization and spamming, and it is on this line that Google can appear to err. However, this is not a mistake by the search engine - in fact, Google calculates rankings by considering thousands and thousands of different factors - and a lot of importance is attached to average "trends" within the niche / keyword range that a website is optimizing for.
The bottom line is that over optimization is non-spamming search engine optimization that is misread by Google as being beyond acceptable limits, thus leading to a penalty in search engine rankings.

What criteria does Google use?

To understand why Google can consider certain websites over-optimized, it is important to factor in the criteria that Google uses to rank websites.
When fully indexing a website, Google does not just look at the optimization of the target website; it also compares the website with all the other websites that belong to the same niche / category / keyword range. Through this comparison, Google can then figure out the following:

• Is this website "way more" optimized than the current top ranking websites?
• In the past, have over-optimized websites been discovered as spam websites?
• What are the trends / acceptable limits for well-optimized websites in this niche/keyword range?

Since Google is automated, it cannot do what we do - look at the webpage and determine if the purpose is spam or delivering truly useful information. Instead, the search engine uses historical trends to predict what the acceptable limits of over-optimization are, and how likely over-optimized websites are to be found out as spam

Importance of Robots.txt

Robots.txt file is a very important file if you want to have a good ranking on search engines, many websites don't offer this file. A Robots.txt file is helpful to keep out unwanted search engine spiders like email retrievers, image strippers, etc. It defines which paths are off limits for spiders to visit. This is useful if you want to hide some personal information or some secret files.

What is Robots.txt

Robots.txt file is a special text file that is always located in your Web server's root directory. Robots.txt file contains restrictions for Web Spiders, telling them where they have permission to search. A Robots.txt is like defining rules for search engine spiders (robots) what to follow and what not to. It should be noted that Web Robots are not required to respect Robots.txt files, but most well written Web Spiders follow the rules you define.

How to Create Robots.txt

The format for the robots.txt file is special. It consists of records. Each record consists of two fields : a User-agent line and one or more Disallow: lines. The format is:
":"
The robots.txt file should be created in Unix line ender mode! Most good text editors will have a Unix mode or your FTP client *should* do the conversion for you. Do not attempt to use an HTML editor that does not specifically have a text mode to create a robots.txt file.

User-agent

The User-agent line specifies the robot. For example:
User-agent: googlebot
You may also use the wildcard character "*" to specify all robots:
User-agent: *
You can find user agent names in your own logs by checking for requests to robots.txt. Most major search engines have short names for their spiders.

Disallow

The second part of a record consists of Disallow: directive lines. These lines specify files and/or directories. For example, the following line instructs spiders that it can not download contactinfo.htm:
Disallow: contactinfo.htm
You may also specify directories:
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Which would block spiders from your cgi-bin directory.
There is a wildcard nature to the Disallow directive. The standard dictates that /bob would disallow /bob.html and /bob/indes.html (both the file bob and files in the bob directory will not be indexed).
If you leave the Disallow line blank, it indicates that ALL files may be retrieved. At least one disallow line must be present for each User-agent directive to be correct. A completely empty Robots.txt file is the same as if it were not present.

Why Google Banned Websites?

It's a simple question... Are you asking Google to penalize your website?
I'm sure you're probably thinking; Well, of course not! Yet daily I see new people complaining in search engine optimization forums that their websites have been banned by Google and they "have no idea why".
These people claim they've done nothing wrong and are absolutely clueless as to why their site is no longer in Google. The purpose of this article is to teach you one VERY important thing.
What NOT to do when optimizing your website, to make sure you don't get banned.

How do you know if you've been banned?

First let me show you how to see if you're clearly banned by Google. Often times people think they've been banned, when in reality they've just dropped in ranking and can't find their website.
There are a couple of things you can do.

• Check Google's search results.
• View the Google toolbar.

Check Google's search results

Go to Google and enter your entire URL into Google's search box. In this example we'll use a made up domain name. (www.jkhljkhkjh.com). On a side note, I tried www.somerandomdomain.com and www.fakedomainname.com and both were already taken. Apparently we've got some creative people out there... :-)
Anyway, we'll go to Google and enter our entire URL and click "search"
http://www.jkhljkhkjh.com
Notice that Google says there is no information available for this URL? This means that the URL is no longer in Google's database (a.k.a. index)

How to choose the Right Domain Name?

SEO Material provides few important rules to choose the right domain name. While the availability of domains which follow all of these rules may have become limited, try to follow as many of these rules as possible.

• Consider naming your company and registering a domain name starting with the digit 1. Better still, choose a name starting with "1st". Why? When people create directories of web sites, they have to decide how they are going to classify those web sites. One way to classify web sites is to list them on the basis of how "good" they are. Another way is to simply list them in chronological order (and sometimes in reverse chronological order) based on the dates the sites were submitted.
  The other, and far more popular classification system is alphabetic. Now, the first character in the ASCII chart which can be used as the first character in a domain name is the digit 0. The next character is the digit 1.
  Normally, you wouldn't want to start a domain name with the digit 0 since it might send all the wrong signals to your customers. For instance, if we had named our domain 0SearchRanking.com, it would be telling our customers that we cannot get them any search engine rankings at all! Hence, unless you really have a good reason for doing so, you should avoid using domain names starting with the digit 0.
  

SEO Analysis Conclusion

Search engine optimisation is focused around a wide range of topics to master. Here are the key factors to overlook and deal with in order to succeed in search engines.

What part of SEO do you start with?

A comprehensive SEO analysis should preferably start with analysing competitors and their SEO strategy. With a keyword analysis, it’s possible to find out some of the keywords driving most traffic and how you can do it better?

Do search engines include your site?

Prominent search engine rankings can only be archived if your pages are included and indexed in search engines. In general, the more indexed pages you have, the more authority you get.
Various technical issues can prevent parts of your site from being indexed. Absence of internal links to new pages are a common reason why certain pages of yours don’t rank well or can’t be found at all.

Classic on-page SEO: How are you being presented?

One of the most important on-page factors to get right is to make sure there is no technical issues. Furthermore, you need to check the status of your titles and headlines. Both titles and headlines should be unique, have keywords included and be present on all sub pages.

Social Media Presence

Social media mentions, likes and social links are one of the latest and quickest rising ranking elements in search engine optimisation. Discover more of what it means to have a presence in social media and what to consider in order to gain success.

What is social media?

Social media can be defined as ‘websites based on user participation and user created text, video, audio or other multimedia’.
Noticeable examples may include social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus, micro blogging sites like Twitter, forums like TheStudentRoom, video sharing sites like YouTube, social bookmarking websites like Delicious and social news sites like Digg.

Are you present in social media?

Even if you are not present in all social media channels yet, it’s wise to make sure to at least protect your name. If you don’t have time or resources to employ a person working with social media, perhaps you can focus on a chosen few channels?
Twitter, YouTube and Facebook can be some of the most obvious ones. There is often a major community or forum to participate in, where people might speak about your brand. But in the end, the choice of which channels you should use also depends on what industry you work in and which preference you have.

Technical Issues?

Technical Issues with websites are more common than you might expect. The problems may turn out to be small or big, but in either case, they affect your search engine rankings negatively. In order to succeed with search engine optimisation it’s fundamental to solve your technical problems first.

What Do Technical Issues Have In Common?

There are many types of technical issues which can impact your SEO.
The common denominator for the technical problems is that they destroy your search engine optimisation, or at least make sure that your search engine rankings deteriorate.
Some of the most frequent types of technical problems are likely:

• Duplicated content: Makes it hard for search engines to understand which subpages are most important.
• No sitemap: Might be harder to find all subpages on your domain.
• Unreadable URLs: Session ID’s and parameters making it hard to read and understand what’s to expect on the site.
• www and Non-www issues: Having multiple URLs you get links to.
• 404-issues: It’s important to analyse your 404 issues and do something against them.
• Multiple domains with identical content: It’s never a good idea to have exactly the same content on multiple sites.
• Changing content or urls: This technical problem can often be corrected with a simple 301-redirect. But like always, there might be exceptions where other practices might be recommended.

Web Usability Factors

Web usability factors affect everybody browsing through websites, regardless if you are aware or not. Visitors usually want to get what they are looking for fast, or they might leave straight away and go to a competitor.


Above: Satisfied website visitor
SEO Specialist argues that usability factors should be seen as an integrated part of your overall search engine optimisation strategy.

What is web usability?

Web usability can be defined as ‘the art to design a website that is easy to use and simple to learn from‘. At the same time, you must be able to complete tasks with it, while your website should appeal to as many visitors as possible.
SEO Specialists short description of what to keep in mind about web usability is the following:
“Make it easy to complete tasks. This will make users happy”.

Why care about web usability?

Your website should be able to be used by as many visitors as possible without confusion. If your visitors don’t find what they are looking for, they are likely to leave within seconds. Below you’ll find a few factors to take into account.

What about your Backlinks?

Backlinks, incoming links or simply inbound links are one of the most misunderstood factors in search engine optimisation, but also the single most important. Continue below to discover some of the first steps to take in a backlink analysis.

What is backlinks?

A backlink is simply a hyperlink, which can be seen as a reference from another website to your website. Without good backlinks, you will not experience prominent search engine rankings – at least not for competitive keywords.

Why backlinks factors are often misunderstood

Many people believe that backlinks are mostly a numbers game. I would say they’re not. Focus on trusted, high quality backlinks instead. Having outstanding content makes it way easier to get those relevant, high quality backlinks that will make your website increase quickly in search engine rankings.
The reason backlinks are so often misunderstood is partly because:

• Data Overflow: There are a lot of various metrics to follow in an analysis of backlinks.
• How To Isolate Factors: It’s very hard to isolate various backlink metrics for the average webmaster.
• Link Quantity: At first, it might sound logical that links is a numbers game. Then you realise that search engines have long term statistics over each and every link and rank them according to the content quality, new link speed among other factors.
• Hard To Measure: It’s hard to measure link quality and trust for average webmasters.

External Links

Referring to other websites by giving an external link to them is one of the most underestimated ranking factors in search engine optimisation. However, linking to less legitimate websites can seriously hurt your rankings as well.

External links should therefore be done in moderation and only when linking adds value to your article, shows a different angle or dimension and is well-deserved. Here is what to consider before giving a link to another website.

What is an external link?

While internal links go within the same domain, an external link can be defined as ‘A hyperlink directed to another website’.
Visual Example: www.YourSite.com (How a visitor see it)
HMTL Example: www.YourSite.com (How a developer would see it)

Don’t be afraid to link out to credible sources:

Many businesses are afraid to link out to other websites. It’s wise to be cautious about whom you link out to, but don’t be afraid to link out if an external link is deserved.
Giving links to ‘credible websites’ with high quality content is usually beneficial for your website ranking and it’s visitors. Who are you linking to today? And why do you link to them? In the next paragraph SEO specialist gives advice on what to keep in mind when you are about to put in a link.

Internal Links?

Internal linking is an important factor in search engine optimisation. Internal links can be useful for search engines to find new content, and as a voting mechanism to lift up your best content.

What is internal linking?

Internal linking can be defined as a link that’s a reference or part of the navigation on your own website, pointing to another webpage on your own domain. It’s basically a link going from one page on your domain, to another page on the same domain.
Let’s show an example how a link to a popular page on SEO Specialist will look like:
• HMTL Example: SEO School (How a coder view it)
• Visual Example: www.SEOSpecialist.co.uk/school (How a visitor view it)

Jump links – A different type of internal links

Apart from the standard internal links as mentioned above, there are also “jump links”.
They are ways of linking to a specific part of a webpage. The main difference between internal and jump links is that jump links refer to a certain element on the page.
With jump links, you need to define a name attribute, and place it in a link in order for it to work.
• HTML Example: Section B (How a coder view it)
• Visual Example: Section B (How a visitor view it)
Jump links can be useful for web pages with a large amount of text and headlines.

External vs. internal link juice

Getting new power from a link is often described as getting ‘link juice”. When comparing the power from internal and external links, it’s clear that external links to your website give way more impact on search engine ranking.
However, you’ve got better access to your own website, and you can adjust, modify and tweak your internal links development as much as you want.
With external links, it’s harder to change and you don’t have any control over it. Therefore, the internal links are a good place with your internal search engine optimisation.

Are your headlines SEO friendly?

Headlines are the 2nd most important on-page ranking aspect. Even though it’s a rather basic factor in search engine optimisation, you get a considerable positive effect if headlines are being used optimal. Learn how to create SEO friendly headlines below.

What Is A Web Page Headline?

A short definition of what a headline is can be: A headline is the heading or sub-heading of a web article. A picture of a main headline and sub headline in web content is shown below.
PIC 1: Main Headline
PIC 2: Sub Headline

What’s the meaning of a headline?

The purpose of a headline is to describe what a certain article is about. A good headline will convince the reader to read the whole article, where as a not so good one will more likely put them off.

Why are headlines so important?

For search engines, headlines basically mean “a more important piece of content than rest of your webpage copy”. If you view headings in the same way, and spend time to create perfect headlines, prominent search engine rankings will follow (- at least if you follow rest of SEO School’s advice).

Headline engagement: the 80/20 rule

From your average website visitors, 80 % are likely to read your headlines. However, only 20 % of your visitors will read the rest of your content. The better the headline, the more likely you are to convert your visitors. So what can you do to make your web visitors read more of your content?

Are your titles SEO friendly?

Web page titles are one of the most important ranking elements in search engine optimisation. Let’s get started..
Optimising titles has been important since the first search engines were launched, and SEO specialist expect titles will keep its importance in the coming years.
Read below to find out why it’s so important to write user friendly titles and what to consider when doing it.

Background: What is a web page title?

When people search on Google, Bing or Yahoo, they often scan through the web page titles, meta descriptions and website URL. In contradiction to meta descriptions, the exact title as you write will always be displayed (except for the start page, if it’s included in Open Directory).

Why are titles so important?

Web page titles heavily influence your search engine rankings. It’s considered to be one of the 3 most important ranking factors. The title of your web page is also used in many instances, such as:
• Displayed for users in search engine listings and for people searching after your products/services.
• It’s not uncommon to get backlinks with your website title (or the web-page URL).
• Used by default in many web browsers.
• When you save a page as a bookmark, the title is used per default.
• If your website uses feeds, the title of your latest posts will be seen here.

Unique titles on all sub-pages

You need to make sure to not have identical titles on all subpages of your website. If not, you are making it hard for both users and search engines to understand the true purpose of the subpage.

Potential Search Volume

Let’s look at some of the most common keyword analysis tools and methods to find out the potential search volume for a website. So, where do you start finding your potential search volume?

Which keywords are there potential for?

After doing a proper competitor analysis, you have found out what the main competitors are using for keywords. This is usually a good start, since its important factors for your overall search engine optimisation strategies. Now it’s time to do a keyword analysis.

Doing a keyword analysis is based around the principle that you get a deeper understanding of what your target group will be searching for. Yes, that’s exactly how it works. People go to Google because they have a question or problem to solve. Your website is the one supposed to solve it.
It’s not enough to know which 100 keywords your potential users are writing most frequent in Google. You also want to know which forms are used (ie: singular or plural?). Further, it’s important to understand which other keywords are used together with your main keywords (Example: London, UK, cheap or quick). Basically, you need to understand your target group’s language in search engines to succeed with search engine optimisation.

Keyword tools to find potential search volume

There are a wide range of tools to extract keywords from. The one that you use is completely up to you. However, the most common keyword tools are probably the following:
• Google AdWords Keywords Tool
• Google Insights
• Google Trends
• Google Zeitgeist
• Wordtracker
• Microsoft AdCenter Keyword Tool

Keyword Analysis

It’s time to find out which keywords you’ve been using so far. If a certain keyword or phrase is not found in your content, you are not very likely to be seen at the top of search engines for that keyword or phrase either.

Continue below to find out why analysing the keywords and phrases used today is an essential part of search engine optimisation.

The relationship between search engines and keywords

If search engines were like sharks, then keywords would be the fish they need to grow. One fish is not enough: a big search engine like Google needs 100’s of relevant keywords in your content if you should get a decent amount of traffic.
It’s very easy to find yourself writing general words from time to time. However, to ensure you’re found in the search results you should be as specific as possible.
There are literally billions of pages with information about various topics – and it becomes harder to be found, since new websites are launched every day. If you don’t stay ‘on topic’ with your content, your chances of being found are very slim.

Indexed Pages

How many sub-pages you have included in Google, Yahoo and Bing is an indicator of how visible and important your site is. If you are not indexed, ie: included, you cannot be found either.


Make sure all your web pages are included in Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Determine indexation

To get all your web pages indexed or included in search engines, the first step is to consider search engine optimisation. Before you are found, you don’t exist for search engines and therefore cannot be found by any users either.
If you for instance publish 20 pages, but only 10 are found in Google, there might be some kind of technical problem with your site. It also may be because you have no internal or external links pointing to your newly published content, or there might be duplicate content issues.

How many indexed pages do you have?

It’s simple to check out how many indexed pages your websites got. Simply type ‘site:www.yoursite.co.uk’ (change to the name of your own website) in Google, Bing or Yahoo:

Why care about the amount of indexed pages?

As mentioned before, only pages that are indexed can be found. A large collection of indexed pages can give the impression of authority to search engines. Websites with large amounts of content and indexed pages are often ranked better than small sites.

Content & Conversion Analysis

Content and website conversion analysis are closely linked to your search engine optimisation efforts. If done in close symbiosis, you can expect to see great outcomes.

Let’s start with your current content and determine what to consider.

Entry points for your web content

If your competitor and keyword analysis have been done properly, you will be more likely to see visitors coming in to your website from a wide range of keywords.
That is of course a good start, to have a wide stream of visitors coming in. But what do you do with them while they are on your site?

Is your content unique and selling?

When you get visitors on your site, it’s important that your content is interesting enough to keep them there. Otherwise, they will not suggest it to others, nor will they become potential customers for you.
You need to ask yourself: Is the website content authentic, unique while answering queries from visitors? That’s usually the most important part.
Furthermore, you need to ask yourself, ‘What is the purpose of my content’; does it lead to a satisfying level of sales/conversions? If not, perhaps it’s time to come up with a new plan.

SEO Analysis

• • 1. Competitor Analysis
  • 2. Content & Conversion Analysis
  • 3. Indexed Pages
  • 4. Keyword Analysis
  • 5. Potential Search Volume
  • 6. Are your titles SEO friendly?
  • 7. Are your headlines SEO friendly?
  • 8. Internal Links?
  • 9. External Links
  • 10. What about your Backlinks?
  • 11. Web Usability Factors
  • 12. Technical Issues?
  • 13. Search Engine Rankings
  • 14. Social Media Presence
  • 15. SEO Analysis Conclusion

How to Improve SEO Rankings with Google Plus

In our attempts to improve SEO rankings we do miracles and try everything we can think of. Of course, even if we could, it makes no sense to try absolutely everything. What makes the most sense, is to try something that does have great effect on our SEO rankings, yet is not known to everybody and their brother. G+, Google's social network meets these requirements – seems to do miracles for rankings, while most people, (except those who try everything), who do employ social networks for SEO, concentrate their efforts on Facebook because it is more popular than G+. However, it turns out G+ pays more for our efforts than Facebook and the other social networks. Here is why.

Why Google Plus Is Especially Important for SEO

While Google denies any direct relationship between Google Plus content and activity on one hand and SEO rankings on other, very often good ranking sites have good Google Plus activity. While in theory this could be pure coincidence, the results speak for themselves. Here are some reasons why Google Plus is especially important for SEO:

• Google owns it and no matter if they admit it or not, as empirical evidence shows popularity on Google Plus is a huge factor for good rankings.
• Some links are dofollow and they help to improve rankings. Not all links are dofollow but unlike on other sites, at least the so called "shared" links (the links under your post) are dofollow, so take advantage of that. Additionally, when you post something interesting that gets reposted, you earn multiple links to the same page.
• Links from Google Plus get relevant anchor text - the title of the post is the anchor text (which obviously is much better than "Click this", "Here", or other generic anchor texts) and the best is that this anchor text sounds natural and won't hurt your rankings.
• Ultrafast indexing of all pages is another benefit. While it is true that Google is fast to index any site that gets frequently updated, the advantage of Google Plus over Twitter and Facebook where all or most of the content is hidden from search engines is hard to beat.