Off-page Search Engine Optimization

Off-page search engine optimization techniques includes anything that you can do, outside your website and which influences your search engine rankings.

Things to implement :

1. Building one-way links
2. Submitting articles
3. Reciprocal linking
4. Purchasing links
5. Purchasing advertising space

The most commonly used method among these is reciprocal linking. When two websites decide to link to each other, or when one website owner finds a benefit in linking to another website and then the other website owner also finds some benefit in linking back to the former website, it is known as reciprocal linking. Now, these links should use anchor text optimized for a particular keyword that you are targeting.

Example : Suppose I am linking to your website/webpage, and you have a site about weight loss training. I should use "weight loss training" as the anchor text for the link from my website to your website. This will boost your search engine rankings for the keyword "weight loss training".


So it is important to trade links with other websites, but it’s more important to pay attention to the words that these other sites are using to link to you. A keyword optimized anchor text improves the quality of the links and thus your search engine rankings too. On-Topic linking is a lot more valuable than Off-Topic linking.

Example : Suppose your friend owns a dog training site, like "how to train your puppy " or for "dog breeding", then a link from that website will not really be as valuable as a link from a "weight loss product" website because it’s off-topic.

However, at this stage off-topic links still helps a bit, but not as much as on-topic links. This is because, google has not yet fully implemented its evaluation of on-topic linking. Sooner or later, google will start considering these things and if you have a lot of off-topic links, they’re eventually going to lose their value.

An even better method is to submit articles :

One of the biggest benefits of submitting an article is that you get to include an "author bio" at the bottom of the article. Here, you have the right to showcase your own site or say a little about yourself at the end of the article. You might say "Mr. X is extremely good at xyz" with a keyword link to your website. It will give your website a boost for that keyword. So when you submit an article and it is picked up by the article directories, you get a valuable one-way link pointing to your website.
One-way links are much more valuable than reciprocal links. Simply because, when you have a one way link going to your website, it is like somebody is recommending your website even though there’s no profit/gain in it for them, so it’s a lot more valuable than the reciprocal links, because in that case, both the websites are linking to each other for some kind of profit.
So, submitting articles to article directories can give you valuable one-way links back to your website, and can also drive free traffic to your website if your article is of good quality.
List of Top 50 Article Directories

There is one more way to get one-way links back to your website, and that is when you purchase advertising spaces. Here, you are actually buying a link to your website from another site. There are two reasons to purchase advertising space :
1. To drive more traffic to your website from people seeing your advertisement and clicking the link.
2. To boost your page rank.

You can buy links from websites with page ranks everywhere from PR-1 to PR-7. If you own a new site, you can purchase a high PageRank link in order to get indexed faster, or to quickly (but temporarily) boost your own PageRank so that you can more easily find people to exchange links with you. It can be a very effective if used correctly.

But, when purchasing links, don't purchase site-wide links. It used to be a very effective method of quickly boosting your search engine rankings. But people started buying like 2,000 to 3,000 links from one website, and each of those links counted towards the search engine rankings. Google noticed that this popularity was artificial and it heavily skewed the search results, so the search engines developed algorithms which checks the I.P. address of websites linking to you, and if there are multiple links from the same IP address, they will only count as one link.