The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 2

Off Page SEO

5. Links and PageRank

Links to your site is the most important Off-Page SEO technique. Simple but true. Incoming links are what determines your natural search engine placement. Yes all the On-Page SEO techniques will influence the variables but the links will determine the strength of your web pages to compete for the top places in search engine results pages. The more strength, the higher in the search engines your web pages will be. Nuff said.

How To Get High Quality Links
It can be especially difficult for a commercial site with no interesting content (for example, nothing but sales pages) to get quality incoming links. No self-respecting, high PageRank site will have a good reason (besides money) to link to a site that is just selling something.

Okay yes Apple will probably have no problems getting quality links to its iPod pages but that’s obviously not a position most businesses enjoy.

Content is King.
The better the content the better the backlinks. Of course you can’t expect quality backlinks to come immediately unless you are willing to buy them. You need to slowly build up an audience that will eventually lead you to enjoy some exposure in the eyes of the quality sites and quality backlinks will come. The best thing is that links from one popular site tends to give you exposure to the owners of other popular sites and momentum will build.

6. Page Reputation

Back to the wisdom of Brad Fallon. Page Reputation is a relatively new concept in the eyes of the web public and has been gaining more and more credence as an important SEO consideration. In a nutshell reputation refers to the value of the sites linking to your site and the value of the links linking to the sites linking to your site. Confusing isn’t it!

Every website has a reputation value and incoming links determine that reputation, however it’s not about the number of incoming links but the quality and reputation of the sites that link.

The reputation of a mainstream news site, for example CNN, is quite high and will have incoming links from other high reputation sites.

If you get a link from CNN then your reputation will rise. Basically it’s measure of a site’s value based on the network of sites linking to that site going back multiple levels of the network.

That’s about as far as my understanding of the concept goes and in my mind ties right back in with the quality over quantity theory.