After mastering the art of on page SEO, it’s time to move on to off page SEO. If you haven’t read my previous post on on page SEO, please read that first because any off page SEO will be ineffective if on page SEO is not first up to scratch.

Off Page SEO is all about getting links back to your website so that it ranks highly for the target keywords on the search engines. These are more commonly known as backlinks.

Choose Your Keywords

The first step to performing off page SEO is to choose your target keywords. You want to come up with a list 10 keywords.

This is how you should divide your 10 keywords:

• 2 should be your primary keywords and the ones you want your website to rank number 1 for in the long run. For example, you may choose “beauty salon” as one of your primary keywords.
• 5 should be closely related keywords which are longer tailed and easier to rank highly for in the short run. For example, you may choose “beauty salon tips” and “beauty salon business.”
• 3 should be vaguely related keywords which are related to the broad topic of your primary keyword. For example, you may choose “beauty training” and “beauty services.”

Linking & Anchor Text

Now that you have your list of keywords, it’s time to link back to your website with them. Anchor text is used to do this.

Anchor text is simply the text that you can see in a link. For example, if the primary keyword of your website was “beauty salon”, then you would want to use beauty salon as the anchor text, just like:

“Try out the best beauty salon on the planet.”

Note: The above is just an example.

You also want to be sure when linking with anchor text is that you are linking to the relevant page. For example, if you using “beauty salon tips” in your anchor text, make sure that it is linking to a page optimised for the keyword “beauty salon tips.” This builds on the SEO rule of optimised each page for just 1 keyword, which was covered in my post about on page SEO.

When it comes to off page SEO, it’s much easier to rank highly for a variety of keywords by linking to various optimised pages than just the main page of a website.

Backlink Sources

You can get backlinks from a variety of sources online:

Article Marketing – this refers to submitting articles (at least 300 words long) to various online article directories such as Ezine Articles. It’s important that you engage in effective article marketing if you want to make the most of this source of backlinks.

Video Marketing – this refers to creating videos and submitting them to major video sharing websites such as YouTube. You must remember to put in the target keywords in the title, description and tags of each video you submit. Don’t forget to link to your website somewhere.

Press Release – this refers to sending out a press release about your website and your products and/or services. Copyblogger can explain how to use press releases better than I can. Once again, don’t forget to put a link back to your website on the press release you send out.

Blog Commenting – this refers to commenting on articles on high ranking blogs online. If you want to leave a comment, most blogs ask you to leave your name and website URL which is then hyperlinked with your name. This is the perfect place to use your target keyword in the anchor text to your website. Be sure to leave comments which are both informative and engaging on blogs otherwise moderator will end up deleting your comment and your backlink will be lost.

Forum Commenting – this refers to participating in high traffic forums about the topic of your website. Most forums allow you to put your website URL with your preferred anchor text in your signature. Just in case you’re wondering, a signature is simply a bit of information that always appears under each of your forum posts. Search engines are constantly indexing forums, so the more you post in forums, the more backlinks you can get.

Social Media – this refers to interacting with people with similar interests in online communities such as Twitter and Facebook. This is a very broad topic which will be discussed in more detail further on. The only thing that you need to know is that search engines are continuously indexing new content and links on these sites so you would be crazy not to get backlinks from these.

Social Bookmarking – this involves sharing your favourite links with folks all over the Internet. This is just like the common bookmark tabs you have on your browser but this time, you are sharing these with the rest of the world. The 3 biggest social bookmarking websites on the Internet are StumbleUpon, Digg and Technorati. Once again, these sites are continuously indexed by search engines so leaving backlinks here is totally worthwhile.

Knowing that there are many sources of backlinks is great, however, they must be used carefully and in compliance with the most important SEO rules of them all. This is covered in the following section and must be thoroughly understood if you want to do off page SEO correctly.

The Most Important SEO Rule

When it comes to getting backlinks for your website, the most important rule is that these backlinks must be created as naturally as possible. I cannot stress the importance of this enough!

In order to remove any confusion by what I said, here’s an example.

Let’s say that the target keyword of my website was “beauty salon” (following on from the example in my previous post). If you go out and get 50 backlinks with the keyword “beauty salon” in every anchor text in just 1 week, then this is not natural. Smart search engines such as Google will detect this and they will interpret this as the work of a robot. For them, if it doesn’t look like the links came naturally, then the link benefit will be drastically reduced and your website will most likely be pushed down the rankings for that target keyword. Instead of helping to improve your ranking, you will jeopardise it.

Even 25 backlinks in 1 week may be excessive.

It all depends on how many different anchor texts and link sources you use. You must write this down on a bit of paper and stick on your wall.

When building backlinks, make sure that you always have:

• anchor text variety
• link source variety

Anchor Text Variety

Anchor text variety refers to a mixture of keywords in the anchor text of your backlinks. For example, instead of using “beauty salon” in the anchor text of 50 backlinks, you can divide it up among a variety of keywords.

You can get 10 backlinks with "beauty salon" in the anchor text, another 10 with "beauty salon tips", a further 10 with "beauty salon business" and the 20 remaining backlinks can be equally divided between the keywords "beauty training", "beauty services", "beauty images" and "beauty day spa.”

It all comes down to choosing a list of 10 keywords which was discussed in the first section.

Link Source Variety

Link source variety refers to a mixture of sources for your backlinks. For example, instead of getting all your backlinks from article marketing, you should also get some from video marketing, blog commenting, social media and social bookmarking.

Once again, the search engines find it more natural that backlinks are derived from a wide range of sources instead of just one source. This will only help you improve your website ranking.

It’s Time To Take Over The Search Engines

With the valuable SEO information presented in this post and in my previous post, you are more than ready to take over the search engines with your websites.

It’s now all about doing the necessary work. If you are able to perform both on page and off page SEO on a consistent basis over a lengthly period of time, there is no doubt that you can reach the top of the major search engines.