You may have heard the term “off-site SEO” mentioned when it comes to optimizing a website for the search engines and wondered what is.
Simply, off-site SEO is the SEO work you perform away from your site. In order to get a high ranking your site needs to have links from other sites pointing to your site (these are known as backlinks).
This helps you achieve higher rankings, especially if sites that already have a high ranking link to you.
There are many ways to get backlinks, all of them simple, but not quick to do. For example, you can write a keyword-rich article about an aspect of your service or product and (with a link back to your site in your “resource box”) and distribute it to several free article distribution directories on the Web. To really make this work, however, you need to post a minimum of two or three times a week (many SEO experts actually recommend five days a week) for at least three months. Regular posting after the months also is important, although you don’t need to post an article to a directory as often.
However, as you grow the number of backlinks over time, you even could eventually get your site high search engine results rankings even for terms that aren’t on the pages of you site.
You also can post and write in forums that deal with your industry and you can post comments on industry blogs. Both take time from other activities, however and also will take time until you see results (a few months).
Yet, you can’t ignore off-site SEO. Too many sites already are well-optimized on their own; you need to do more.