Most people are aware of the basics of on-page SEO. This is where they tweak their keyword density, add more content, add ‘alt’ tags to images and create tags designed to appeal to the search engines.
However, off page SEO can play an important part in getting all these things right in the first place.
Keyword Research
Before you even think about trying to do any on-page optimization, you need to work on the off-page aspect of researching which keywords will attract the right type of visitors to your site.
Keyword research is often misunderstood by a lot of webmasters. It’s not about finding the broadest possible keyword to match your topic. It’s also not always about finding the most searched for phrase on the Internet for your niche.
It’s about choosing the right keywords and phrases that will attract the right customers to visit your site to be converted into paying customers. There are multiple keyword research tools available. Google even offers a free keyword research tool that can sometimes be helpful.
High Quality Backlinks
If a webmaster approaches you and asks for a reciprocal link, or a link exchange between your sites, you might think you’re getting a good backlink. However, search engines are aware of link exchanges and they tend to view one-way links far more highly.
You should also avoid those companies who will charge you a couple of dollars to just spam your URL to a few link farms. Search engines know what link farms are and they don’t consider them to be quality back links at all.
Instead, work on finding ways to get your link on some websites with good page rank (PR) without having to offer them a reciprocal link. You can do this by offering to write a guest article or guest post and then leaving your URL at the foot of the article. You can even do this by submitting to some of the bigger article directories.
Deep Linking
Most people only ever think about getting backlinks that point to their main URL. They focus on spreading that homepage link as far as they can.
However, deep linking, or linking to the internal pages of your site, can seriously help your off-page SEO efforts.
Sometimes your internal pages will focus on slightly different keywords and search terms. By creating some backlinks that point to these, you increase your visibility in the search engines for a wider range of keywords.
