Internet Marketing Coach - Shi Heng Cheong

Off-page optimization is the process to increase the number of incoming links (backlinks) to your web pages and improve the quality of these incoming links. You want other web pages to “talk about” your web pages and link to your website. Increasing link popularity will improve your search engine listing position so that you website can be found on the Internet.

Link Building: Homepage vs Inner Pages

You want to build links from web pages that share similar topic to your website.

For example, this post is about off-page optimization so I would want links from search engine optimization and search marketing related pages, also pages from websites that are related to internet marketing.

Note that I said “web pages”. Not only you want backlinks to your homepage, you also want links to your inner pages. A ratio of 40/60 will be good i.e. for every 100 backlinks, you want 40 backlinks to your homepage and 60 backlinks to the rest of your inner pages. In fact, the more link to your inner pages the better.

The Quality of Backlinks Determines Your Search Engine Ranking

Quantity of backlinks is important and quality of backlinks is vitally important. There is no point in getting links from unrelated websites or websites deemed by search engines as undesirable e.g. FFA. Google will just ignore these links. In fact, Matt Cutts of Google said that you should not bother about link exchanges.

Here’s the common methods to get backlinks are:

1. Solicit links from partners’ websites
2. Directory Submission
3. Article Submission

For more information on link building and linking strategies please read these articles:

• 5 Simple Steps to Link Building
• How To Get Links Without Asking