Off-Page Optimization
What’s Happening Off The Page?
Now that search engines have become more sophisticated, a significant
part of your
site’s ranking consists of factors beyond your site itself.
Without paying attention to
these matters, you will never see strong results from your search
engine positioning
activity.
Link Popularity is a measurement of the number of other web sites and
pages that link
to your site and its pages. Once a primary measurement of the value of
your site, it is
now almost a secondary measure. The number of links is not nearly as
important as
who the links come from, and what words are contained in the text of
the link.
Link Relevance is a measurement of the context and content of the links
to your site.
Links with your keywords in the text, and links from other sites and
pages that are
relevant to your keywords or theme, have a higher value than random
links. This
means that incoming links to your roadmap and destination pages are
often of greater
value than links to your home page, depending on the context of the
link.
Outbound Links are those links on your site that point to other sites
and pages on the
web. The relevance of these links, in terms of how the resources they
point to rank
relative to your site’s keywords and theme, add or subtract
from your site’s theme.
Hubs & Authorities are the two types of sites that theme-based
search engines consider
most relevant. Hubs are sites with outbound links to a lot of other
high-quality sites.
Authorities are those sites that are referenced (linked to) by a lot of
other high-quality
sites. A site can be both a hub and an authority.
Your strategy should take these four factors into account. If your site
is well positioned
as a hub already, you can improve your ranking by increasing the number
and
relevance of incoming links, thereby making your site more
“authoritative.” Likewise, a
site that has a high number of good inbound links (an authority) may
improve its overall
rankings by becoming a better hub.
Evaluating Outbound Links Relevance
Any outbound links you create should point to resources that are highly relevant to yoursite’s theme and its primary keywords/phrases. This means that you should evaluate
the sites and pages you point to, and determine whether they’re strong enough to add
to your site’s theme. Typically, any site or page that ranks in the top 50 on at least one
search engine for a given keyword/phrase is strong enough to add strength to your
theme.
Don’t feel obligated to link to a site’s home page – link directly to the most relevant
pages. I’ve been able to improve the results for several sites just by changing the
outbound links from homepages to content pages which best support the site’s keywords.
Context
When placing outbound links onto your site, the context in which they appear will impacthow well they strengthen your theme. A destination page on “keyword selection” with
links to 4-5 very strong pages with content on “keyword selection” has better contextual
value than the same page with links on “search engine positioning.” Value
Reciprocation
Obviously, when you link to highly relevant resources, a link back to your site is worthpursuing. Given a choice between two possible outbound links (for example, to expand
coverage of a particular topic), I’ll always choose the one that’s going to get me a link
back. Two pages on two different sites that link to each other make both pages better
authorities, as well as better hubs.
Targeting Inbound Links
Establishing inbound links with other website operators should not begin until you’ve
identified and evaluated other sites that can contribute to your site’s theme.