Link popularity and link quality are often viewed as the yin and yang of offpage search engine optimization. Although not necessarily opposing factors, they are certainly complementary. What is the best weapon for improving offpage SEO factors? Sniper rifle or shot gun? This author packs his sniper rifle when optimizing offpage SEO factors and so should you. Read on to learn more about offpage optimization factors and why your web site promotion efforts should be highly targeted.

Offpage search engine optimization refers to factors that are not within your web site that affect your search engine ranking. Offpage factors include which sites link to you, the number of sites that link to you, the significance of the web sites that link to you, the anchor text of the link and other elements about the web sites that link to you. Of these offpage factors, the remainder of this article will focus on the two most noteworthy: link popularity and link quality.

Link Popularity

Simply stated, link popularity is the number of links that point to your web site. Search engines count each link as a vote for your site. Some votes are considered more material than others, but we will come back to that in a moment. You can have the best site on the internet with hundreds of pages of unique content, but if you have limited link popularity nobody will find your website. Bottom line, to boost your rankings in the search engines you need to elevate the number of links pointing to your website. Like a sniper, use a very targeted and focused approach. To do this right, you should focus on building links from authority web sites that are related to your content - slowly. You do this by link exchange programs, buying one-way text links, through article marketing or by posting your link in blogs, newsletters or forums. Just be cautious and use each of these techniques sparingly and intelligently. Search engines are very sophisticated and frown on abusive attempts to inflate link popularity. Inbound links appearing too fast - especially from unrelated websites - can drop your ranking or get you banned completely.

Link Quality

We have hinted around the topic of link quality in the preceding paragraph. Now, let's dive in further. Essentially, link quality refers to the reputation of the site linking to you. This reputation includes the significance, relevance, key phrase density, anchor text and other factors about the referrer. We will focus on a few of these key elements in the remainder of this article.

Significance - Your link building efforts should focus on getting links from sites that are significant. Significance refers to the prominence, presence or the authority of the referrer. Some think of this it terms of page rank, but page rank is an outdated and unreliable measure. Page rank has little to do with rankings these days. For almost any key phrase combination, you can find high ranking sites that have low page rank. Rather than focusing on page rank, focus on getting links from sites that rank high for your related keyword phrases. You can do this by focusing initially on the top ten to twenty sites in each search engine for your key phrase phrases. Try to get a link from each of those sites.

Relevance - Spend your time building links on sites that are related to your website theme. A handful of links from highly ranked websites with related content weigh considerably more than hundreds of links from unrelated insignificant websites. Whether you are exchanging links or buying one-way links from a text link broker, focus only on sites that are relevant to your theme. This writer favors the self policing nature of article marketing when it comes to relevance. Here is why. Suppose your web site relates to rock climbing. If you publish an article about the health benefits of rock climbing, only webmasters with fitness or rock climbing web sites are likely to republish your article. Those are exactly the webmasters you want to use your article so you get a related site backlink. It is doubtful that webmasters running car insurance web sites will republish your article. No reason for alarm. Their insurance web site is unrelated and a backlink would have little value. Whichever method you use to build backlinks, focus on relevant sites to get best results.

Anchor Text - The anchor text refers to the visible portion of hyperlinked text on the referrer's page. As an explanation, the HTML code for a typical backlink may look like this:

<---****HYPERLINK****--->"http://www.mywebsite.com/">SEO Instructions

The anchor text in this case in point is the 'SEO Information' portion of the code. Historically, anchor text played a significant part in search rankings. Recently, there seems to be less significance particularly with Google. It is still an significant factor that you should not ignore when optimizing your off page factors. To see the importance, just type 'click here' as a search phrase in Google. The results clearly show that anchor text is still meaningful. When influencing the anchor text in backlinks, be sure to construct multiple variations of the anchor text that are descriptive of your web site. These variations should be related to the your targeted keyword phrase(s) and themes. Just be cautious; overusing your primary phrase may actually have an adverse affect on your rankings. Search engines view this overuse as spamming.


Once you have optimized your web site, to achieve a top search engine ranking your web site promotion efforts must shift towards optimization of offpage factors. This essentially means boosting your link popularity. You can do this yourself or hire an SEO consulting firm to help. In either case, just be sure you spend your time and money wisely. Focus on getting quality backlinks from high ranking web sites related to your theme. When offpage factors are being optimized, concentrate on quality over quantity.

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