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Offpage Optimization
While onpage optimization is an important task, it is the offpage optimization that can rocket your website to the number one position. As opposed to the onpage optimization process, this process is much more time consuming and difficult, but if you are serious about getting your site listed in Google, you will have to be able to do this. Let me give you a brief overview of what offpage optimization is and how it works.
Essentially, offpage optimization is the number of links that you have coming into your site. The way Google indexes pages is based on a voting system. If another site has a link to your site, essentially, they are casting a vote for you site saying that the content on your site is credible. The more sites that link to you, the more votes that are cast for your website. HOWEVER, Google is smart enough to realize if your site has hundreds of bogus, unrelated links coming in. You need to get links to your site from other sites that are closely related to the content on your site.
Also in the equation for this process is the page rank of sites linking to you. Page rank is a tool used by Google that pretty much gives an estimate of the number of quality inbound links to your site. If you have the Google toolbar, you can look at the middle of the bar and there should be a place where it says "Page Rank," with a white bar under it. If you hover your mouse over this, it will tell you the page rank of the site you are currently on. If you do not have the Google toolbar, I recommend that you go to their website and download it.
So let's put together what we know:
- We need links to our site
- Those links need to be from quality pages, related to our content
- The higher the page rank of the link, the better
Well now we really have 2 options, both of which we should take advantage. The first way to get links to our site is by searching for link directories. There are tons of directories out there that you can get your link put in for free or simply by reciprocating their link on your website. It's simple enough: all you have to do is search for (keyword) link directory in the search engine, and quite a few results should pop up. Another way to find link directories is to just go to a few websites related to your content and try to find their links page. Many sites have links pages that you can simply submit your links to, and once you have submitted your link and reciprocated their link, they will add you to their directory.
Now submitting your links to link directories can be helpful, but most directorees do not have a high page rank, and often they are not really related to your content. So we have to find a good solution to this problem. The solution is to look up websites related to your website, and simply email them asking to exchange links. A sample email would look as follows:
Dear Webmaster,
I have just visited your site and think that it would be a good resource for our visitors. I have gone ahead and added your link to our website, and I was wondering if that was ok. Also, I wanted to see if it would be possible for you to do the same for us. Here is our information:
Title: (website title)
Description: (website description)
URL: (website url)
I hope that this can be beneficial for both of our companies. Please email me back and let me know what you think.
Regards,
Your Name
It is usually a good idea to add their link to your site first, because this shows that you are really interested in their content. The best way to get other sites to link to your site is by giving them something original that they want to link to. In some situations, you have to be a little bit creative and offer others something to get something. Building links is an ongoing process. You have to keep up with your competition, so you will continually want to build links to improve your rankings. When emailing different people, don't be afraid to try different things. Many websites ARE going to turn you down, but you have to keep changing your strategy until you find something that works. Once you finally find your niche, your website can take off and become a very profitable tool for you. |
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