Last time I looked at some simple things you can do to make your website more search engine-friendly: on site Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
But, as I mentioned towards the end of that post, off-site SEO ultimately carries more weight with the search engines than on-site SEO does.
So, today I’ll take a look at a few things you can do to improve your off-site SEO.
What is off-site SEO?
Off-site SEO is basically what the Internet at large thinks of your site. Is it an Authority site..? Does it have good information..? Is it updated regularly..? Do people like it and find it useful..?
Remember that the objective of the search engines is to provide the most relevant results possible to searchers. This is what drives them. Their customers are searchers, not webmasters and, as much as we may not like that fact, that is what we have to understand and work with.
So off-site SEO is largely about the number of incoming links you have to your site.
But beware: there are links and there are links! The search engines long ago learned to identify and give less (or no) weight to reciprocal links, links from link farms and links secured simply for the purpose of having links.
You have to have high quality, incoming links to figure well with the search engines. That means links from sites in the same or a related niche and links that have relevant anchor text.
This takes work. Ongoing work. With on-site SEO you can get everything set up right and then let it run. You may need to make some tweaks or adjustments occasionally, but once it’s done, it’s basically done.
Off site SEO, however, is a never-ending project.
So how do you go about getting good quality, incoming links to your site?
In the first place, by producing good content. This is the basis of everything and, without it, you won’t get quality links.
Content that’s original, helpful, funny or controversial. Basically, content that people like so much that they link to it and become repeat visitors.
Here’s where two things become important:
- Selecting a topic for your site that you enjoy writing about, and can write about.
- The ability to write well.
Despite the arrival of audio and video, which are both powerful media for webmasters to use, you still need to have good copywriting skills to get people to take the final step: to click your link or opt in to your autoresponder list.
If you can’t write well, or don’t like writing, you’ll need to consider whether to hire a Ghost Writer or a Copy Writer. However you do it, you’ll need to have well written content on your site.
The next step is to find a way of putting good quality content onto your site on a regular basis, and you have 2 very useful tools for this:
- A blog
- An RSS feed
All things being equal, blogs tend to be more attractive to search engines than static sites are, because it’s easier to update them more frequently.
So if you’re running a blog, be sure to add to it regularly! But, just as important, be sure to add good quality content.
And if you’re not running a blog start one. Or a wiki or a membership site – something that gets updated frequently!
A blog can be a part of your site (as mine is) or your site itself can be a blog.
Make sure that you update it regularly. There are those who will tell you to update your blog everyday but, in my view, this is dependent on the type of blog you’re running.
A news or news-related blog probably needs to be updated each day. Or even more frequently if you’re following a breaking story.
But an authority blog doesn’t need to be – at least not in my view. With an authority blog I prefer quality to quantity. Two really good articles a week do more for my blog than 5 that don’t offer value.
If you don’t have a blog and don’t want to start one, using an RSS feed is another way of getting fresh content onto your site regularly. There are a couple of important things here:
- The search engines will know it’s an RSS feed
- Because of that, you will need to select a feed that is totally relevant to the topic of your site and provides valuable content. Content that people will come back to your site to read time and time again.
OK – so the basis of getting high quality incoming links to your site is good content. Without that, however many people you point towards your site, they won’t link to it.
In the next article I’ll look at some ways that you can point people to your high quality content, so that they find it and do link to it. A linking strategy, in other words. So stay tuned!
Leave us a comment with your thoughts.
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