Off Page SEO-9 Great Sources of Backlinks for Your Website

Off page optimization essentially involves all of the things that you do away from your site which will influence how Google and the other search engines rank your site.

Back links are key to this and backlinks are simply links from other sites on the internet which link back to your site.

The quality of the backlinks linking to your site is important and the higher page rank of the site from which the link to your site arises, the better for your site and it’s ranking.

Link relevance is also important and links from sites in the same market as your site are better than links from non-related sites.

Link extensions are also important and links from .gov or .edu sites are well worth getting and Google and the other search engines place a high value on these links.

Quite how high anyone’s guess but it is is widely accepted that they are seen as more trusted than many other types of links you might get.

Don’t forget to take a look at video 1 which is an introduction to search engine optimisation and keyword research and video 2 which takes a look at on site seo.

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Where to get back links?

1)  Directories

Website/blog directories such as dmoz.org and other well regarded blog directories.

Check though whether they are do follow or no follow by looking at the source code of the directory. Themed directories will give you more link juice-a themed directory is a directory of sites in the same market as your site occupies.

2) Article directories

Submission of an article to article directories-article directories such as EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com and ArticlesBase.com will accept your article and in return you will get traffic and most importantly a backlink from these well regarded sites.

The key to this sort of backlinking is to ensure you have a great article title and a resource box that persuades visitors to click through your backlink and visit your site.

You will also find your article being syndicated by other webmasters looking for content for their site which will in turn increase the number of backlinks you obtain, provided they leave the resource box intact.

Note that ArticlesBase.com is “no follow” but has a very high pick up rate from a syndication viewpoint by other webmasters as ArticlesBase makes it very easy for other webmasters to do so and is well worth using.

NOTE: Since the Panda/Farmer update by Google of it’s algorithm in 2011 the value of backlinks from article directories has been significantly devalued and they are not nearly as effective as they were.

3) Press Release sites

There are many free and paid press release sites which will distribute your press release.
The best and most effective one is pRweb.com-you will have to pay but it has shown me a very good return in the past and will generate traffic and some good quality backlinks for your site through your one page press release.

4) Forums

Look for forums which are popular in the market you occupy. Use “keyword+forum” to find them in a Google search and join the forum.

Make a contribution with useful information and link back in your signature to your website.

Useful contributions are key-do not spam.

5) Other blogs-blog commenting

Blog commenting is also an excellent way to generate back links because you can get some great high page rank links combined with relevance.

And if you make a valuable comment on many blogs you will generate traffic to your own site from other readers who click on your link to your website when you post your comment.

Finding relevant blogs with some page rank is made considerably easier with software such as BlogCommentDemon (affiliate link) which will search the internet for blogs which contain the seed words you put into it’s search box.

(Here is a link to a free ebook which explains in more detail exactly how Blog Commenting Demon software works.(contains affiliate link))

You will then be presented with a list and links to hundreds of blogs and you can ascertain the page rank of the blog itself and whether it is do follow or no follow.

There are some other good features also such as how fresh the most recent post is and the ability to check back to see whether your comment has been accepted or not.

6) Social bookmarking sites

Social bookmarking sites are great ways to get your new content indexed by the search engines.

When you publish a new post or page you simply bookmark it on some of the top sites such as Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com, Delicious.com and Reddit.com.

These sites are very regularly visited (many times per day) by Google robot spidering their content and the link back to your site (which you will have obtained by bookmarking the page on your site) will be found quickly with the result that your new content will enter Google’s index quickly.

Submitting to hundreds of these sites is possible with various services such as OnlyWire.com and Bookmarking Demon.(affiliate link)

Here is a link to a free ebook about Bookmarking Demon which explains more about social bookmarking and how to use the software to best effect.(contains affiliate link)

7) Video sharing sites

If you have video (and you should) then you can submit it to various video sharing sites like YouTube.com, DailyMotion.com, Revver.com, Vimeo.com and many others.

Sharing and distributing your video in multiple locations is made easy and possible by TubeMogul.com which allows you to distribute your videos to video and social bookmarking sites across the internet.

This is really a great service and is free.

If you don’t have video to promote your blog/website it is really easy to create your own videos for free-check out that post and video to learn how.

8) Document sharing sites

Document sharing sites such as Scribd.com and Docstoc.com are other very useful sites from which you can obtain back links, traffic and some back link juice.

9) Web 2.0 sites

Wordperss.com, Blogger.com, Typepad.com, Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com and similar sites allow you to publish your content on their platform.

You can do so in the form of a page or a blog but the key thing is to have links linking back to your main website and all of these sites are well established sites with a lot of page rank.

Summary

Off page optimization is vital for the success of your site but this will depend on how competitive your market is. It is possible to rank a website really well for less competitive markets and small businesses can easily rank their site with the minimum of effort if they choose the right domain name and set up their website properly to begin with by creating a good structure and on page optimisation.

In more competitive markets back linking and back linking campaigns require ongoing  and consistent effort at all or a combination of the sites above.

Self proclaimed “seo experts”

There are many people claiming to be seo experts.

And they really don’t want you to realise that search engine optimisation is not a hugely complex activity.

But clearly they have a vested interest in ensuring that there is enough fog and confusion around the issue to prevent you from learning the basics yourself and looking after your own website.

The choice is yours..but nobody apart from a few high ranking engineers in Google and the other search engines truly know how their algorithm is set up and the constant tweaks and changes they make to it on an ongoing basis.

But using some of the sources referred to above have led to very satisfactory and profitable results for us as evidenced by this post about building niche websites..

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