Most SEO discussions revolve around on-page tactics, which refers to optimizing the content of your website. This includes working with the text, links, images, and tags associated with your website.
What you should also dial into is off-page optimization (also referred to as off-page SEO), which is also important for driving additional organic traffic to your website. It’s a way of marketing your website, getting ranked in search engines and making a name for yourself.
Professional SEO strategists have an arsenal of ideas when it comes to effective offpage optimization. Here are just some of the techniques you can use once your on-page SEO has been implemented.
• Create social networking profiles, use them to make connections and update your status regularly. Let everyone know about promotions and events within your company. Great examples of popular community websites are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but you don’t have to stop there.
• Publish optimized press releases with a newsworthy angle. Submit them to popular PR websites.
• Create a company blog and add new, original content on a regular basis. Go one step further and promote your blog in blog directories and blog search engines such as Technorati.com.
• Write news articles for your website and submit them to bookmarking sites like Digg.com or Reddit.com or article sites like ezinearticles.com. These are great sources of traffic generation to your site.
• Publish photos and make them public and open to comments. There are a number of such sharing sites including Flickr.com and PhotoBucket.com.
• Share videos that promote certain aspects of your company, like products or services. Allow for comments and reviews. Some popular video sharing sites are YouTube.com and Metacafe.com.
• Participate in forums/discussion boards daily. Contribute both new questions and responses to existing questions, but make sure you come off as knowledgeable and not as a spammer.
• List your company in local business listings, online yellow pages and directories.
• Ask and answer questions in answer websites such as Answers.Yahoo.com.
These are just some of the things you can do to accomplish offpage SEO. Make sure anything you write for your campaign is relevant to your website. Never go overboard, or your efforts might be perceived as spamming.
Even though some of the tactics above don’t always get the direct (or “followed”) links that search engines crave, you can get a lot of buzz and natural links by keeping a high profile in the online world. A presence in the offpage world goes a long way when it comes to building organic search engine links.
