SEO For Blogs – Off-Page Optimization

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 newcorridor

In a recent post, SEO For Blogs – Strike The Right Balance“, we talked about the importance of SEO for blogs and covered some of the basics for on-page optimization that you want to follow.

In this next post, we’re going to cover the all-important off-page optimization. In a nutshell, off-page optimization refers to backlinks from other websites and blogs that point back to your blog. These external backlinks establish and build authority for your blog in the eyes of the search engines. In essence, these backlinks are viewed as votes that say “this blog has some relevant information on this subject, and you should check it out”.

Off-page optimization carries more weight with the search engines

While on-page optimization is important for search engine ranking, and you need to incorporate good on-page optimization as you build and add content to your blog, the fact is that off-page optimization carries more weight and influence for the search engines in establishing higher rankings in the search engines indexes. You cannot expect to achieve first-page search engine rankings without sufficient backlinks to your blog.

Not just any backlinks to your blog will do

It’s also important to pay attention to the quality of backlinks that you acquire. Backlinks from on-topic, thematically related websites are more relevant and carry more weight than backlinks from totally unrelated sites. More important, backlinks from highly trusted sites recognized as authoritative on the subject provide more ranking power for your blog.

A link from one website to another can actually carry a keyword description which serves as an indication that describes what the link is referring to. This description is actually a component of the link, known as the anchor text, also referred to as the link text.

Without getting too technical, let’s look at the anatomy of a link.

Let’s say I have a link that points to the home page of this blog, “Blog Sites For Small Business”. The URL is http://blog4smallbusiness.com. And I would like to associate the text description “small business blogs” that will be displayed with the link. Underneath the covers, we would construct the HTML link tag as follows:

<a href=”http://blog4smallbusiness.com“>small business blogs</a>

Notice how the URL highlighted in green is associated with the anchor text highlighted in blue.

Now, when this link tag, as shown above, is placed on a page (within a blog post for example), it will look as follows: small business blogs

You see the anchor text “small business blogs”, and when you place your mouse pointer over the link text, it’s actually a hypertext link that you can click on which takes you to the URL http://blog4smallbusiness.com.

OK, not to cause your eyes to glaze over. The important concept here is that the “link text” (anchor text) is associated with the link URL. More important, the search engines evaluate, rank and score this link by associating the link text with the URL. In other words, when Google looks at this link, they record the URL http://blog4smallbusiness.com as being about “small business blogs”.

So, why is this link text significant?

If you put a keyword that you want to rank for in the anchor text, for example the keyword term “small business blogs”, and you can manage to get that link placed on an external website, then the search engines will establish that your blog (as indicated by the URL in the link) should be associated with the keyword term “small business blogs” (as indicated by the anchor text in the link).

Now, if this well-formed link with this relevant keyword in the anchor text is found on an authoritative website related to the same subject matter as indicated by the keyword in the anchor text, then the ranking score starts to add up big time for you.

And when the search engine follows this backlink to your blog and finds out that your subject matter reinforces and supports the keyword found in that backlink’s anchor text, now the stars are beginning to align. So how do the search engines figure out what your blog is about when the search engine spiders come to visit? That’s right, because your on-page optimization supports and reinforces the same keywords that your off-page backlinks support in the anchor text.

So, you might be asking the question, “how is a website or blog established as a high-authority site on a subject matter”? Good question. Here’s the basic formula.

Lot’s of content (many pages or posts) that reinforce and support the keywords around a particular subject or theme
Many backlinks from external websites. These backlinks reinforce and support the same keywords around a particular subject or theme.
And backlinks from other authoritative websites on the same related subject matter carry even more weight.

So what number of backlinks constitutes “many” or enough backlinks to start influencing your ranking position in the search engines. Well, it’s actually relative depending on the competition for the particular keyword. For lower competition keywords, you may see the ranking influence for as few as 2 or 3 backlinks. For highly competitive keywords, you may need thousands of backlinks to outrank the competition.

That covers the basics of off-page optimization. In an upcoming post, we’ll talk about how you actually go about getting other websites to place backlinks to your site or blog on their pages.

Share and Enjoy: