SEO Elite | Off-page SEO Tips

SEO Elite – Effective SEO Tips and Tricks For Off-page Optimization

SEO Elite and other search engine optimization (SEO) tools are extremely useful in off-page optimization. The theory of off-page optimization is simple. The popularity of a webpage decides its position or ranking in the search engines for the targeted keyword. However, the difference here is the algorithm different search engines use to measure popularity. Another difference between the search engines is the weight they place on popularity of the web page in their web ranking algorithm. There are other off-page factors that the search engines consider when deciding where your web page would appear in the search results.

If you have been a webmaster for a while, you would understand the importance of link popularity. A link pointing to your web page or website is a vote of confidence for your website. It used to be easy to grab top search engine positions in the early 90s when the internet was in its infancy stage. By just getting a number of links to your webpage, you can easily outrank your competitors. But gone are those days. Nowadays, search engines look beyond just the quantity of backlinks that are pointing to your webpage. Google has the most sophisticated algorithm to measure the popularity of a webpage, followed by Yahoo and then MSN.

Let’s take a look at what are the key factors in determining the popularity of a web page for a specific keyword:

Effective SEO Tip 1 - Quantity of Backlinks

While Google is not giving too much weight to quantity of backlinks in its search engine ranking algorithm, the number of backlinks to a web page is still important for the smaller search engines. One hint for you is to take advantage of this. Take at look at the latest search engine market share figures in 2006, you would notice that the smaller search engines account for about half the number of online search traffic. Imagine if you could conquer them.

Google - 49.2%
Yahoo - 23.8%
MSN – 9.6%
AOL - 6.3%
Ask Jeeves - 2.6%
Others – 8.5%

Effective SEO Tip 2 - Quality of Backlinks

Search engines are now paying more attention to the quality of backlinks. In the past, getting backlinks is a manual and tedious process. Webmasters have to search and find other websites who are willing to exchange links with them. This is often done through emailing the webmasters one by one. Fast forward to today, there are many online tools that make the process of obtaining links quick and easy. Along came mass spamming tools and techniques such as guestbook and comment spamming that flooded the internet scene. Building backlinks become even easier.

In order to improve the quality of their search results, they have to differentiate web pages by the quality of their backlinks. Quality can be measured by the following:

a. Links from authority or high Page Rank (PR) websites are more valuable

b. One-way links carry more weight than two-way links or reciprocal links.

c. Links with relevant anchor text is important in building keyword relevancy.

d. Good link neighborhood, ie links found in web content that is relevant to your target keyword/topic is important for the search engines. Example, a backlink for a website that focuses on SEO tips and tricks that is found in another website that talks about search engine optimization or web traffic is more relevant than one found in a shampoo website.

Several SEO tips and tricks for you to improve backlink quality:

Use your main keyword in the anchor text for about 70% of the backlinks you are obtaining, while the rest of the 30% should contain variations of your keyword in the anchor text. Example here: Say you are targeting “SEO Tips and Tricks” for your web page, make sure 70% of your backlinks contain the anchor text “SEO Tips and Tricks” only. The rest will have variations such as “Effective SEO Tips and Tricks” or “Best SEO Tips and Tricks”. This would escape the search engines’ spam filters.

Target one keyword phrase first before you target another one.

Effective SEO Tip 3 – Domain Name and Age

Did you know that your domain name is important to the success of your web ranking exercise? Here’s a free SEO tip for you. In order to secure a good search engine ranking for a particular keyword phrase, seriously consider including this keyword phrase in the domain name. It works wonders in influencing the search engine ranking and positioning especially if your keyword is not too competitive. Once again, I will use “SEO Tips and Tricks” as the keyword phrase to illustrate this point. Ideally, I would buy a domain called SEO-Tips-And-Tricks.com or something similar.

The domain age is gaining more significance as a part of the search engine ranking equation. Google favours older domains perhaps because they are more established and more unlikely to be used for spamming activities.

Learn in my next post how SEO Elite makes the whole process of gaining web popularity and search engine ranking such an easy task.