A Single Step
Welcome to my quest to become an internet marketing Jedi. Follow me as I learn SEO, Affiliate Marketing, Niche Marketing and other online money-making strategies. Hopefully, some of you will learn from my baby-steps. Perhaps, one day, when I've mastered all this, I'll teach you.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Off-Page SEO

Hi, folks.

Today, I'll tell you what I know about off-page SEO.  Once again SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.  Off-page SEO refers to things you do outside of your website/blog to get search engines to notice you and climb their ranks.

Off-page SEO seems to be primarily abut building back-links.  A back-link, again, is when another website posts a link to YOUR website, as opposed to you posting a link to someone else.  Every back-link you create is like a vote for your site.  The more you have, the more popular and authoritative you look.  Now, it should also be mentioned that the QUALITY of your back-links is even more important than the QUANTITY.  One back-link from a highly-respected, authoritative site is worth more than a hundred back links from a bunch of sites no one's ever heard of.

I did a Google search for the "Best Ways to create back-links" (or something to that effect).  I then looked at each result on the first page and came up with the following Top Seven Ways to generate back-links:

1.)  Blog Commenting - This is where you go to someone else's blog and comment on their stuff.  It needs to be a meaningful comment, though; don't just say something for the sake of saying something and creating a back-link.  The problem with this idea, as you might imagine, is that's HORRIBLY inefficient.  To get any movement on the search engine rankings, you need a LOT of back-links (unless you can swing a few good quality back-links) which means you have to find a LOT of blogs you like and make a LOT of comments on them which is probably as tedious and time-consuming as it sounds.

2.)  Article Submission - You write an article and submit it to an article directory or an internet magazine.  There's plently of both out there.  Some of the top directories are EzineArticles, Article Dashboard, GoArticles, Article Base, and Buzzle.

3.)  Forum Posting - You post questions and comments on forums related to your kind of content.

4.)  Directory Submission - There's a ton of website directories out there.  You should probably submit your site address to at least the top 10 or 20.  Technorati is probably the biggest one.  There's also Yahoo!, DMOZ.org, zeal.com, directoryworld.net, and Clickey.

5.)  Social Bookmarking Sites - These are sites where you can "Like" a website.  Stumble is one.  There's also Digg and Reddit. 

6.)  Social Networking - I think this means Facebook and Twitter and the like.  You can have a facebook page devoted to your site or your blog and that'll drive some traffic your way along with some back-links if people really like your stuff.

7.)  Guest Posts - This is where you write an article for someone else's blog.

Really, though, it sounds to me like the best way to generate back-links is through a hybrid of methods called a Link Wheel.  There're lots of different ways to construct a link wheel, but the one that sounds best to me - the one that I intend to use - came from Pat Flynn's site SmartPassiveIncome.com, which he says came from a popular internet marketing forum called Warrior Forum.  I like this strategy because it's multi-layered.  It's really quite brilliant.  I'll let you follow the link to Pat's site and watch the video of him explaining it rather than me explaining it all right here.  That'd take a whole other post by itself.

So, that's off-page SEO, for you.  Again, it's all about the back-links.  Next time, I think I'll try reposting as much information as I can FROM MEMORY.  When I've been making these posts, I've been looking at my notes.  I wanna see how much of this shit I can rattle off without my notes.

Wish me luck.

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