This article assumes you’ve read the lesson on The Best Offsite Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips – Part I.

In this lesson we’ll continue exploring Offsite SEO methods, particularly those involving more ways of getting backlinks.  As mentioned in Part I a backlink is essentially a link to your website or webpage on another website.

Each backlink can be seen as a vote of approval for your webpage. The more inbound links a webpage has, the higher its link popularity. Google bases its PageRank (PR) on link popularity, but uses a complex algorithm which takes several factors into consideration, including the quality of the link.

How to Build Good Backlinks

If done properly, backlinks with targeted keyword anchor text (hypertext) can carry sufficient weight to gain high search rankings for terms not even occurring on the page.

Also consider one-way links to your website are of far greater value than reciprocal links obtained from engaging in link exchanges.

Links to your webpages should have the primary keyword(s) in the anchor text. However, as you build more links, remember to introduce variations of the text by changing the order of words and add modifiers. Sometimes use secondary keywords or synonyms instead of your primary keyword as this looks more natural to search engines. Do not frequently changes the existing anchor texts as this appears suspicious to Google. The topical relevance of the text adjacent a link is also of importance, and some of the reason links from within content carry more weight.

As search engines endeavour to make it more challenging to cheat their ranking algorithms link diversity is becoming increasingly important. Natural inbound links to quality sites originate from many places like directories, forums, blogs, articles, press releases, reviews, and so on, in diverse geographic locations.  They also link to many different pages on the website, and have a greater variety of different anchor texts. Essentially, what search engines look for are sites which deviate from the pattern potential spammers follow, particularly if the website hasn’t existed for long.

How to Avoid Search Engine Penalties

Don’t build backlinks too quickly as hundreds of backlinks appearing for a particular website in a short period appears unnatural, as though an automated program has placed them.

As a consequence the links may be discounted and the webpage or the website may be penalized. But because Google uses the rate of link growth over time to indicate the freshness of a page, building links rapidly is often not overly desirable.  If you create many links to a page and then slow down, the page may be considered old and its rankings will fall as a result. Attempt to build backlinks steadily, if possible building more each month to emulate the exponential curve of organic link growth of popular websites.

Do not participate in organized link exchanges or link farms. The better ones may perhaps be effective in the short term, but all too often they do more harm than help for your rankings. This is because Search Engines view it as manipulation of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and when they discover the network they either penalize all the linked websites or at a minimum devalue the all links.

Don’t waste time building links on webpages which have hundreds of links! The more links on a webpage, the smaller the share of its Page Ranking your webpage will receive.

If you can’t get a back link on a webpage with a particularly high PR, try to place a link on one of the pages it links to.

How to Encourage Sharing of your Webpages

Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus offer various tools to allow users to share your webpages across the social networks they are subscribe to. 

You may have seen Facebook’s “Like” button or Twitter’s “Tweet This” button or Google’s +1” button on other websites which are for this very purpose.  

If you have an account setup with each of these websites it’s very easy to implement one of their share buttons.

Facebook Social Plugins
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/

Twitter
https://twitter.com/about/resources/buttons

Google Plus
https://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/

If you want to reach out to a wide variety of social media websites, it’s always helpful to put a “Share button” on your webpages.  When a user clicks the Share Button a small window appears filled with dozens of Social Media website icons.  When the user clicks upon one of these social buttons, a link and sometimes summary your of webpage’s content is posted on their social profile.  So this means everyone following the user on that particular social website can see the link to your webpage.

There are many existing solutions for sharing your web content across a variety social media websites, but here are some of the most popular:

• AddThis
• ShareThis
• Shareaholic

There are many more strategies for building backlinks which we will cover in future articles.  Next time we’ll look at methods of automatically sharing your link to dozens of Social Media websites every time you publish a blog post.

Till then, if you need any assistance with offsite or onsite Search Engine Optimisation, don’t hesitate to contact us via the form below.