Offsite Optimisation
Offsite search engine optimisation is a critical part of the whole search engine optimisation process. Offsite optimisation in primarily concerned with improving and moulding your sites reputation and popularity amongst the rest of the web community.
Search engines use your web reputation and popularity to help them determine where to rank you for specific keyword searches. In fact as the world wakes up to SEO and becomes more proficient at onsite optimisation the search engines are ever increasingly tweaking their algorithms to take offsite factors into account.
Why is Offsite SEO Important?
The search engines use offsite factors to help them differentiate between sites which score fairly evenly on technical and content factors. If faced with two websites which are on the same theme, are built as effectively as each other, have a similar level of unique quality content and are both well optimised for the same keywords, the search engines find it difficult to determine which should rank higher than the other. The only way they can determine this, is by looking at the sites popularity and reputation across the rest of the web. The site with the best reputation and popularity wins.
What does Offsite Involve?
Most of the work on Offsite Optimisation is based around building links from other sites into your site – often called inbound links or backlinks. The reason why other sites are linking to you, the number of those links and the value of those links are all key influences on how the searches determine your reputation and popularity.
Every website in the Internet has the ability to link to other sites. If a site links to another site the search engines see that link and count it as a vote in favour of the site. The number of votes your site has and the stronger those votes are, the more popular and trustworthy your site will be perceived.
- Age of the links
- Age of the domain (www.) that the link is coming from
- The type of content on the page where the link is coming from
- The title of the page offering the link
- How many other links leaving the page that is linking to you
- The PageRank of the page linking to you
- The trust attributed to the site linking to you
For many companies offsite optimisation and back links seem just too difficult to influence and too time consuming to affect, so they have fallen back on onsite optimisation. However in the long run offsite is going to be the real determining factor for search engine rankings and companies ignore it at their peril.
