Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO relates to measures you can make to raise awareness of your site away from your web pages. These typically refer to techniques such as article submissions, press releases, directory submissions and more.
These are excellent ways to get authoritative link referrals back to your website, also increasing your own website’s authority in the process. Article submissions are pieces of content written about information relating to your field and submitted to relevant portals in your industry. Press releases are a great way to publicise your company and promote any recent happenings that may have occurred, whilst directory submissions give quality links back to your site as well as helping you to appear in industry listings. There are many other examples of off-page SEO to cover – the best way to sum up off-page is that it generates key, quality links back to your website that increase your authority.
PageRank
A site about fly fishing may have a PageRank of 1 whilst Facebook is chugging merrily along with a PageRank of 10. All well and good – but what does it mean?
PageRank is entirely Google-based and gives an indicator of a website’s authority at that point in time. Many people obsess over the PageRank of their website. We recommend keeping an eye on it, but not becoming too involved with the whole thing. It isn’t crucial to the successful running of an online business.
PageRank is valued between 0 and 10, and is a snapshot in time of a website’s current progress. A higher PageRank means you’re more likely to appear toward the top of SERPs and highlights how important a page is in Google’s eyes. It’s a clever link analysis algorithm named after co-founder Larry Page, and is very useful for separating quality pages from their poorer relations.
Linking
Links back to your site are the key focus for off-page SEO. Referred to mainly as backlinks, they can help increase the authority of your site – if submitted to the proper places. Articles and press releases, though they may be informative, need to be submitted to quality industry portals. If they are submitted to poorly-maintained sites then you won’t see any benefits. Even worse, if they are submitted to obvious link farms then you may be found guilty by association and possibly penalised.
If a site with high authority links back to your website then you’ll see the benefits if your PageRank is significantly lower. The best way to boost your authority if you’re just starting a website is with article submissions and directory submissions. If you submit your website and details to a paid directory with huge relevance to your industry, even better! You should always seek strong links from high-authority sites to improve your own authority and to spread the word about what your site can offer.
Social Media
Social media is everywhere, and comes in the form of Twitter, Facebook, Digg, YouTube and other similar sites. Viral is the key word here. If your online marketing campaign catches fire and goes viral, the traffic implications are absolutely enormous.
The social element of the internet is being capitalised on even more as time progresses. It’s a great way to get your business out into a concentrated market if you angle it the correct way, and can get your message across to a user-base in a faster way than articles and press releases ever could. However, there is a lot to consider when integrating social media into your SEO campaign. Do you know how and where to angle your campaign? Will people get bored of it quickly? Does it speak to them on a number of levels?
Of course the benefits far outweigh the negatives. If your campaign were to grace the front page of a website such as YouTube then the traffic benefits are almost instant. It’ll be instant exposure to your site, as though someone has shone a huge spotlight onto it and introduced it to an entirely new, untapped market.