Tag: DMOZ

In last article you discovered a list of task to do for onpage SEO. This article will focus on offpage SEO.

If we consider the time use to “do SEO”, there are only 20% – 30% time (or less) to do onpage SEO, the remaining 70% – 80% of time is doing offpage SEO.

Offpage SEO simply means to get as many one-way links pointing to your website as possible. Links from other websites with similar content is perfect, but it is also no problem with links that is completely irrelevant to your website. Afterall, a link is a link. Although irrelevant page link may not be as powerful as relevant page link, you will still benefit from those.

Here are the tasks list for offpage SEO:

* Put keyword in link: Keyword in link means that you have your keyword in your tag, like your keyword here. “href” is the web page to go to when someone clicks on that link. So in order to maximize your SEO offer, do not just put “click here” or “go now” in the tag. Instead you put your keyword there. The logic behind this is that: when someone uses that keyword to link to your site, it means your website content is about that keyword. So you are strongly recommended to put your keyword in link.
* Links from authority site: Consider the difference of power of link from CNN.com and website-you-never-heard-of.com, people will trust the content more from CNN.com than that of unknown website. This is the power of authority. Simply put, high authority, well-know websites have link power that can boost your website ranking higher for particular search term.
* One way links: In previous article we discussed about one-way links and, the more the better. One way link is a link that a website pointing to you but you do not need to point it back. The ways to get one-way link is normally by publishing articles to article directory or using social bookmarking service, which is described below.
* Social bookmarking: Social bookmarking is a service that you can save your favorite websites online for later retrieval and referral. The benefit of using social bookmarking service is that you can access your saved bookmarks anywhere in the world when you can connect to the Internet. Social bookmarking service is also a good source for one way link. You simply bookmark your website in those social bookmarking sites. To faciliate the process of bookmarking, you can use a free service called SocialMarker.com to semi-automate the process.
* Links from top website directories (DMOZ or Yahoo): Although there are tons of website directories that you can submit your websites and listing on there, those directories are often in low authority and not really help your website. However, there are two website directories that have high authority and worth check out. The first one is DMOZ.org, which you can submit your website for free but it takes very long time to list your website in there directory. Another one is Yahoo directory listing, which costs (at the time of this writing) US$299 per year. If you need high authority link, you may want to try those services.
* Blog commenting: commenting on blog is another way to get one way links. However you should not post irrelevant, pure spam comment to destroy other people’s blog. If you don’t like spam comments, please don’t do this to others.
* Continuously add 20 links or more each month: this can maintain your SEO effort and keep up on your competition.

SEO is an ongoing progress. It means you are required to put effort continuously in order to keep your website position high in search engine. I hope that this article can help you understand more about the tasks to be done for offpage SEO.

In my days as a SEO consultant I’ve seen too much people making the same mistakes and I’ve decided to write down a few guidelines you should follow when doing search engine optimization or link building for your website. Here are 4 ideas to get you started:

1. Don’t Throw Away Your Links

A very common problem for many webmasters is that 70% of their incoming links point to www.yourwebsite.com and 30% of their incoming links point to yourwebsite.com. Search engines think that these are 2 completely different pages on your website, therefore the content on www.yourwebsite.com gets only 70% of the “link love” it actually deserves. How to fix that? You need to make a 301 Redirect from one page to the other and your problems are gone. Look into the folder with index.htm, index.php or whatever your website is using. There should be a .htaccess file – if there isn’t one, simply create it with any text editor. Once you have a .htaccess file, add those lines to it:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %HTTP_HOST ^yourwebsite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourwebsite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

2. Deep Linking

Don’t spend all your efforts on building links only to your homepage (e.g. www.yourwebsite.com). Having lots of links pointing to other pages on your website tells search engines that there is good content to be found all over your website. Pointing all your links to your homepage is a sign for search engines that your website is shallow and doesn’t provide as much value to the visitor as it should.

3. Secret: A Great Way to Get Free High-PR Links!!!

This is an idea we haven’t shared with anyone so far, but our registered members really deserve to know about it. There is a way for you to obtain highly relevant High-PR links for free! How to do that? Take a look at some quality, trusted directories (such as Yahoo, DMOZ, Business.com, Aviva) and find the category that is closely related to your niche. Click on the websites listed there and you will see that quite many of them are dead! Now use a query on Google such as “link:www.somedeadwebsite.com” to see who is linking to those websites. Inform administrators of the websites, linking to dead pages, that they have a broken link on their website and in a large majority of cases they will be happy to replace their broken link with a free link to your website. Yes, it’s as easy as that!

4. Use Smart Anchor Text

Linking to your website with the words “Click here!” isn’t nearly as helpful as linking to it with something related to your niche, e.g. “used car parts” if you are in this business. However, you should get the right natural looking mixture of the anchor text throughout your incoming links! Rule of thumb: use various keyword phrases in 70% of your incoming links, your URL in 20% and various “click here” variations in the remaining 10%.

Following these 4 guidelines your link building will be way more efficient and your website will appear much higher in search engine results pages, bringing you larger amounts of free traffic and free traffic is what you really want!