The term ‘optimization’ means, ‘an act, process, or methodology of making something (such as design, system, or decision) as fully perfect, functional, or effective as much as possible.’ Although this is the dictionary meaning of the word, in modern day ecommerce it has a more serious implication.
Optimization is vital for the success of your business. For example, when you want maximum number of people to visit your website, you need to do ‘search engine optimization’ or SEO. One of the important strategies you can use for SEO is off page optimization. In case you want to know what off page optimization is really about, simply read on.
Off page optimization can be summed up as those techniques that can help you improve your webpage search ranking but are not directly implemented on the webpage or the HTML file. These techniques are primarily involved with your website’s inbound and outbound linking or ‘link popularity’ as it is commonly called.
The commonly used techniques of off page optimization are:
•Inbound Linking: this is done by placing the links to your site on another website.
•Article Submission: this is the process of writing articles related to the content of your website and submitting them to various article directories and other websites. This can help create back links easily.
•Directory Submission: unlike article submission you simply submit the link to your site along with a brief description of the content to various site directories.
Other popular techniques are press releases, link exchange, three way linking, blogging, and posting on forums.
These are important because the major search engines look beyond the conventional on page optimization, done for a website, while ranking a site. Some of the important things to be considered while doing off page optimization are:
•The quality and type of website that you are linking your site to: Search engines look for relevant content between two linked sites and so you must ensure that.
•The number of sites you are linking your site to: a considerable number of relevant sites that link back to you can establish your site as an ‘expert’ and thus, give it high page rank.
•The Google page rank of the sites that link back to your site: it is desirable that you have some high ranking relevant sites linking back to you instead of many low ranking ones.
•The anchor texts of the links to your site: anchor text indicates the relevance between your site and the linking site. Thus it should include your primary keywords. But at the same time anchor text also needs to be variable in order to appear as ‘natural’ linking to the search engines.
•The title of the webpage that links back to your site: it’s not enough if the title is something like ‘link directory’. Ideally the title should be relevant to your site and include at least one of your keywords.
Because of the changing algorithms of search engines, it is important that you understand and implement off page optimization in your efforts to get a high page rank for your website.