Dirty Blue Widgets - Use Off-site Seo

Although you may have optimized your website for the keyword term dirty blue widgets you need to take the next step and optimization off-site as well. Optimizing your website can take time but once it is done you may only need to tweak it now and then to keep things up to date. Off site optimization however can go on indefinitely. The only thing that limits your really is the time and resources you are willing to put into your off-site search engine optimization efforts.

Off-site search engine optimization is everything that you need to do beyond the webpages of your website. And one of the main things you need to do is to build links to your website. Consider links from another site to be a vote for yours. When people put a link on their site that leads over to yours they usually do so because your website has some value to their own visitors. The search engines recognize this and count and evaluate all the links that point to your site. A link from a site with a high page rank counts as being more valuable than one from a lower page rank. But keep in mind that, except for certain areas, any link is valuable to obtain.

When it comes to getting links, what you want more than anything else is an "anchored text link" to your website. If you want to know what a useless text link is think about how many times you have seen a reference on a website to "click here" to do something. The search engines will take that phrase "click here" and will rank that website under the searches for "click here"! do you want people to search for your website by typing in "click here" in a search? Doesn't do much good if you are selling dirty blue widgets doesn't? if you go to Google and search for "click here" you probably will see Adobe at the top of the rankings. What does click here have to do with Adobe? Not much other than a lot of people download Adobe reader by clicking on "click here" in so many websites. You want the links to your website to be anchored with the key words that you want to rank for. The normal way of creating an anchored text link is by using the HTML command < a href="url">keyword to be displayed. Note that you want the keyword used to work in conjunction with the URL. If the keyword to be displayed is >dirty blue widgets< then the URL should have something to do with dirty blue widgets to gain the most value. The search engines will pick up the keyword term in the URL and it will help you to rank for that keyword term. Adding even more value to the keyword term is if the anchored text link is contained within a paragraph or an entire page that has to do with widgets, or even better dirty blue widgets. And of course the more relevant the entire website is make sure link even more valuable.

Two of the types of links that may not prove valuable are paid links and ones from link farms. The search engines frown on paid links. Remember, a link to your website is considered a vote as to the value of your content and the value to visitors looking for a website like yours. A paid link is very much like a bribe, not really a voluntary vote is it? Avoid paid links or make sure you don't get caught. If you do, it could mean your website is devalued or deindexed completely. If you're de-indexed you don't get a chance to show up in the search engine results at all. Link farms are groups of web sites that link to all the other websites in the group. This is an attempt to game the search engines by increasing the number of links in a non-natural way to a site and to get it ranked higher in the search results. Sites that have been caught participating in link farms or large scale cross linking have been penalized and major participants have even been de-indexed. There are other types of "link farms" but the message is clear, don't become involved in them unless you're willing to accept the penalties for being caught. The search engines prefer to have your links grow in the natural, "organic" way.

There are other relevant ways to get back links that we will talk about in coming articles. In the meantime, continue your off-site optimization to get your website ranked highly in the search engines.