When you first put a site on the internet you need to do something to drive traffic to your website. That’s where off-site optimization comes in. Google wants the most popular and reputable sites to appear at the top of the search results, one of the the ways that they determine this is to review who is linking to you and how much traffic is coming into your site from other sites.

If you have not opened any inbound links and are doing anything to drive traffic other than having a site, you wont get a lot of first pages. Certainly not any very competitive search phrases.

There are a number of ways to do this. Ask your clients to link to you if you sell B2B, Write educational content and post it on opinion sites, use video optimization to drive traffic from YouTube and other video sites, and list your site in internet directories are the most common and effective means of offsite optimization.

But this is an area that can be fraught with peril, in the past many SEO companies would use the tactic of responding to article posts on big websites and placing a back-link in the response because it was effective. The problem is that Google did not like that practice and has now not only made it in-effective but now actively punishes sites with too many of these. So any off-site optimization should be clearly within was Google thinks is legitimate.

If you do something that works but is not within the spirit of what they are looking for they will eventually stop you, then you are spending a lot of money to dig yourself out of a hole. Its best to use tactics that Google considers legitimate. We completely avoid any tactic that Google frowns on and only follow their good content guidelines so that our customers will never face punishment for something that we did in our optimization.

One of the things that’s seeing a lot of great results right now is video optimization. Creating unique videos that are embedded on your site can have a huge impact on your rankings. Google owns YouTube so its a good idea to use this service properly if you want to rank well on Google.

Video Optimization is also a good idea because people will watch a video before they will read the entire page, you can summarize your content and deliver your message more effectively.

We work with a top notch actor to create these videos for your site.

The sites with the most links tend to rank the highest. There is a little more to it than that of course. But the bottom line is that you need links and lots of them. There are many types of links both good and bad continue reading to see what is worth doing and what you want to avoid at all costs.

This is a simple link to your website from another site using your web address as the link. So a link to my site might look like www.yoursite.com or https://yoursite.com. As long as your links are not coming from warez sites, adult sites, drug sales sites or gambling sits this type of link won’t ever hurt you.

A back link is a link to your website using a search term that is then hyper-linked to your site. For example if you are a Registered Investment Advisor in New York you might want a back link that says Registered Investment Advisor New York You can get away with that if its in context. Lots of people went around commenting in articles placing back links that had nothing to do with the article. It worked for a while but one thing you need to know if you can’t fool Google for long. They considered it bad form, warned people to stop then made it so that if you kept doing it, your rankings would suffer. So when back linking make sure you follow the rules. Google wants you to vary these as well. If you just use the same keyword over and over you will get hit with over optimization, now you must go after whole groups of keywords.

An internal link is a link from one part of your website to another part. Every site has some internal linking in the form of a menu. Internal linking can help Google understand what pages are relevant for search terms. Internal linking should be part of any SEO strategy. An example of a internal link would be Sign up now. That link will take you to my sign up page of course and this is another signal to Google what the page is about. Don’t use internal linking to try and rank for a keyword that’s not relevant for the page and of course don’t over do it.

This is where you link from your site so another site and they link back to you. This is perfectly acceptable as long as the site you are trading links with is relevant to your site. A link to and from the Chamber of Commerce is acceptable. Linking to suppliers or people you do business with is also acceptable. But be warned too much of that can be bad for you if Google thinks you are trying to link farm.

This is creating a page on your site where you just have tons of links to other sites who are in turn doing the same. The best advice I can give you on link farming is DO NOT DO IT. This used to work many years ago but its a really really bad idea now. Google killed this a long time ago but some SEO companies are so out of date with their knowledge they still do this!

I mentioned comment links earlier, If you are say a spine surgeon and you comment on an article about spine surgery with a relevant comment then a link to your site is perfectly legitimate. If you are a spine surgeon and you comment on an article about crowing crops with a comment about spine surgery, Google will hit your site with a penalty. So if you want to comment on an article and its not about what you do, leave out the back link.

This is the best place for a back link, there are some pretty hard and fast rules about these. You cant just repeat the same article over and over again. You have to write a new article every time. You can write the same basic info, but it must not be worded the same. No copy and paste. I believe there is an update on the way that will make this even harder and the penguin update already had a big impact on these types of links. They are very good when done right, another reason to hire a professional.