The 4 Critically Essential Off-The-Page SEO Factors

In our last post we talked about the things you can do on your website to help it rank well in the search engines — in other words, the on the page factors. In this post we’re going to talk about the external factors that can influence your rankings — the “off the page” factors.

Your Google PageRank

Before we get into the “hows”, it’s important that you understand a little bit about Google’s PageRank. PageRank is Google’s way of indexing all content and websites based on importance in the internet community. It’s an important factor in Google’s ranking algorithm, and by understanding a little of how it works, you’ll have a better idea about how to boost your rankings in the world’s most popular search engine.

To establish the “importance” of your page, Google looks at how many other websites are linking to your page. These links are like “votes”, and the more “votes” you have, the greater your online “importance” and the higher your PageRank.

And higher PageRank is an important contributor to higher search engine rankings.

It’s not as democratic as it sounds, however: Not every page that links to you is given equal “voting power”. Pages that have a high PageRank have more voting power than pages with low PageRank. This means that the “boost” a link gives to your own PageRank is closely related to the PageRank of the site that’s linking to you.

For instance… receiving just ONE link from a PR5 page might well give you more benefit than receiving 20 links from PR0 pages. It’s quality not quantity that’s important.

The equation for working out how much PR value you’ll get from a link looks something like this:

  • PR = 0.15 + 0.85 x (your share of the link PR)
  • By “your share of the link PR” I mean that every site only has a certain amount of PR “juice” to give out. Let’s say a page has 100 votes. Lets say it has 20 outgoing links on that page. Then each link is sending 5 votes to the other site. (100 / 20 = 5) That is a simple way of looking at the share of the PR of the link. In reality the higher-placed links get higher voting power, (e.g. 10 votes each) while the lower-placed ones will get less, (e.g. 2 votes each).

There are many other factors at play that determine the PageRank of a page:

  1. The amount of PageRank flowing in to your page. PageRank can come from other sites linking to your page, but also from other pages on your website linking to your page.
  2. Your internal linking: As I just mentioned, PageRank can also come from other pages on your website, trickling from one page to another through your internal linking, menus and such. The trick is to “sculpt” the flow of your PageRank so that it “pools” in your most important pages. (In other words, don’t waste your PageRank by linking to your “contact us” page and site-map all over the show… add rel=”nofollow” to those links to stop the PageRank leaking through to them.)
  3. The number of pages in your website: the more pages your website has, the higher your PageRank will be.
  4. The number of external sites you link to. Again, think of PageRank as being something that “flows”. By linking to lots of other websites you’re letting your PageRank flow out of your page, rather than allowing it to pool. Try to have reciprocal links wherever possible, so that the PageRank flows back to you.

The best piece of advice is to keep these points in mind when building your site and try to avoid any on-page factors which might be detrimental to the “flow” of your PageRank through your site. Once you’ve done that, work on getting quality links from quality websites. The easiest way to do this is to fill your website with useful, relevant information that makes people want to link to you!

And remember: PageRank is just part of Google’s ranking algorithm. You’ll often see pages with high PageRank being outranked by pages with lower PageRank, which shows that there’s much more at play here!

#1: Build lots of 1-way incoming links

Do this through article submissions, directory submissions, submitting articles to blog networks (such as the PLRPro blog network), buying links (e.g. from digital point forums), and so on.

But be careful…

Purchased links can sometimes be more powerful than links you get by more natural methods… but Google will penalize you if they know that you are buying links. One way they’ll nab you is if you buy a link on a monthly lease and then end up canceling it. One link might not be enough to send up the red flags, but some people buy and cancel hundreds of links in this manner.

A better idea is to buy lifetime links from places like forums.digitalpoint.com, and to try to find links from websites that are on topics relevant to your own.

#2: Get some links from good sites

By “good sites” I mean websites that have a high PageRank, or sites with a high “trust” factor (such as Yahoo, Dmoz or sites with a .edu suffix. If you can get good links to the pages on your site that generate the most income for you, even better — if you can improve the ranking of these pages you’ll get more traffic, more conversions, and more money!

#3: Make sure that pages you gain links from are, in fact, indexed.

A link to your site won’t count for anything if the page that is linking to you hasn’t actually been indexed by the search engines. The search engines won’t see the link, and they won’t give you any credit for it. I see a lot of people submitting their sites to article directories and search directories, and then ending up on a page that the search engines don’t visit. This is pointless!

The good news is that it’s pretty simple to get all these pages indexed. All you have to do is let the search engines know about the page yourself. To do this you need to set up a webpage outside of your main site, such as a free blog or a Twitter.com profile. Make sure that the search engines are indexing this page, of course, and then every time you get a new link to your main site, write about it in your blog or Twitter profile! The search engines will see this and visit the other site — hey presto! The page is now indexed, and you’ll get credit for your link.

Important: Don’t link to this blog or Twitter profile from your main money website. Doing this will create a reciprocal link loop…

#4: Don’t loop your links

Reciprocal links aren’t as powerful as one-way links. This is why you want to receive one-way links from other websites whereever possible.

But there are also things called “reciprocal link loops” which are like bigger versions of this. I mentioned one in the last tip… A links to B, B links to C and C links to A. That’s a loop… it eventually comes full circle back to the first site. A “link loop” can get pretty large, but if it eventually ends up back at the start, it’s still a loop, and all links within the loop become less powerful. Small loops are the worst, but try to avoid loops wherever possible.

Some Related Resources:

That brings us to the end of our critical off-page factors for search engine optimization. Feel free to ask any question you have and don’t forget to leave your valuable comment for this post.

Azad Shaikh

Azad Shaikh

Azad Shaikh is an internet geek at heart. From reviews about computer components to playing X-box one games, Azad takes pleasure in writing about anything and everything about computers. He is a computer engineering graduate and certified ethical hacker. In his leisure time, he reads and explores the internet.

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  1. Reply
    Tweets that mention The 4 Critically Essential Off-The-Page SEO Factors | SEO Geeks -- Topsy.com October 31, 2010 at 6:57 am

    […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Azad Shaikh, Internet Geeks. Internet Geeks said: From Our Blog: The 4 Critically Essential Off-The-Page SEO Factors http://is.gd/gvf2R […]

  2. Great explanation on the concept of Pagerank! ( I am wondering why Google has not updated it – its almost 6 months since last update).

    Avoiding loops is pretty difficult sometimes, because many a times it is not under our control.

  3. Great off-page SEO tips here. Let me take these 1 step further…

    I’m glad you pointed out the dangers with using reciprocal links. 3-way links are even more dangerous for your SEO rank, IMO!

    • Yes having link in loop can destroy your seo efforts as google bot can easily find them. Thanks for stopping by and leaving comment.

  4. Really great info. effective SEO can only be achieve through proper optimization techniques

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