How To Make Online Money

Before focusing on Off-Page SEO, you should make sure you have done everything you can for On-Page SEO.  On-Page is more easily in your control.  YOU are the one creating the pages on your site, so it’s easiest to make sure that you are doing the right things within your site.

Off-Page SEO is essentially about one thing:  in-bound links.  There’s more nuances to it than that, but overall, that’s the most important aspect of Off-Page SEO.

The job of a Search Engine is to return USEFUL results to a query.  One of the easiest ways for them to measure that is to see how many sites are linking to your site with a certain keyword phrase.

There are several factors regarding how valuable an inbound link is:

• anchor text used in the link to you
• rank of the site linking to you
• relevance of the site linking to you
• quantities of links

Let’s look at each of these.

Anchor Text -Anchor text is the text part of the link to your site.  In other words, if your domain is www.furryfootwear.com and you are trying to rank for Bunny Slippers, you would want people to build links with the term “Bunny Slippers” pointing to your site.  If you post a link to your site, for example, in a message forum, don’t just put the www.domainname.com as the link.  If you want proof of how important this is, google the term “Click here”.  I betchya Adobe comes up #1.  It’s because there are tens of thousands of links, many on high-ranking pages, that tell people that if they need Adobe Reader to view a PDF document, they can ‘Click here’ (with the link going to Adobe’s reader).  Get it yet?  Surely Adobe is not TRYING to rank high for the search term ‘click here’…it’s unimportant.  Yet they are number one because that is the phrase that people use when they link to the Adobe site.  Likewise, make sure people are using ‘Bunny Slippers’, and not just your domain name when they link (or when you put links on other’s sites).

Rank – generally, a link from a ‘favored’ site helps you more than a site from a generic site.  Otherwise people could just spin up a thousand bogus sites and put their links on there to their main site.  (It’s been done!)  But the SEs are smart, and know that a link from, say CNN.com or some other authority site has more value than www.i-bought-a-cheap-domain-name1.com .  To find ‘favored’ sites, you can do two things:  you can look at the Page Rank of various sites (you need a plugin for Firefox or IE).  You can see what PR Google has assigned to a given page.  You can also do some searches on your niche phrases and see what sites show up at the top frequently.  Ezinearticles.com, Digg, YouTube…these are all favored sites.

Relevance – greater weight seems to be given to sites that have similar keyword content to yours.  Again, the SEs are looking for good relevance to the search term, so if your site is about Bunny Slippers, links from clothing or shoe-oriented sites will be better than links from, say, gardening sites.

Quantities of links – This is simple…the more inbound links you have (assuming they are of good quality), the higher you will come back in the SE results.

NOTE:  AVOID JUNK SITES at all costs.  DO NOT pay to be listed on ‘high-ranking’ sites.  Many offers will come your way to buy a link from a high-ranking site.  The SEs keep track of the IP addresses that sell links, and are constantly de-valuing the links from those sites.

NOTE 2: There seems to be evidence that ‘reciprocal links’ are not as highly valued as one-way links.  Again, this makes sense…otherwise junk sites could just reciprocate with each other and build their number of links.

A final note: Search Engine Optimization is usually about KEYWORD PHRASES.  When you decide to work on SEO for your site, you should focus on keywords or keyword phrases related to your niche.  Try to rank highly for one or two phrases.  As you build your ranking for those, pick a few more and target those.  Eventually your site will gain recognition as a valuable site to the SEs, because to succeed at this, your site will have to offer something of value.  (Otherwise folks will drop your link.)

In conclusion, Off-Page SEO is about getting inbound links from good, relevant sites, using your targeted keyword phrase in the anchor text.