SEO 101 – #4 – Off-Page SEO (Link Building)
In this video you’ll learn some “off-page SEO techniques”. This video focuses on link building as it pertains to you linking out of your website (outbound links), the next video shows you some easy ways to get those all important links coming to you – also known as inbound links.
Transcript
As I mentioned before, SEO is often divided into two sections, on-page SEO which is what’s contained within your own actual website and its pages and what you have direct control over (which is what we just covered), and Off-Page SEO which is in essence, link building and not necessarily something you have direct control over.
One of the largest factors in getting ranked well in the search engines, especially with Google are the number and quality of links that point to your website. The search engines believe that if someone found your website important enough to link to, then it must contain relevant information.
That’s why getting links to your website’s pages is so important.
There are actually two kinds of links that the search engines take into consideration. Inbound and Outbound links. While inbound links (those links that point to your website) are what affect your ranking the most, it’s also important to understand outbound links (those links that you point to that reside outside of your own site).
Here’s an example of how inbound and outbound links work.
In both cases of inbound and outbound links, there are both good links to have and bad links that you should avoid.
Let’s first talk about the links that you directly control; the links on your own site that point to other sites; known as outbound links.
Whenever you make a choice to link to another website you are telling the search engines that you endorse that site so it’s important that you make wise decisions as to who you decide to link to.
Websites that you link to should be:
A) Related to the content of your own website and helpful to your own site visitors. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself the questions “will this be helpful to my site visitors?”, “does the site I’m linking to directly compete with my own business”? and “is it relevant to my own content?” before linking to another website from your own. Relevancy is a key factor when Google looks at the links on your site. If this same site had instead linked out to Starbucks coffee for example, this would not be a relevant link to have and the search engines do take this irrelevancy into consideration.
B) Second you should not link out to a “bad neighborhood”. A bad neighborhood is considered a website that has been penalized or banned in the search engines and Google makes this fairly easy to spot with the use of their free tool, the Google toolbar which I’ll talk about in just a second.
It’s important to note that who you link to from your own website will have little effect on your own website’s ranking that is, unless you’re linking out to a “bad neighborhood”. So let’s take a look at the Google toolbar to see how we’d determine if a site is in a bad neighborhood or not.
The Google toolbar is a free tool that you can download and install on your web browser. To get the toolbar, just visit http://toolbar.google.com and follow the instructions.
Once you have the toolbar installed it will look like the image below.
Now let’s revisit the “bad neighborhood” links again. A good way to determine if Google considers a site to be a “bad neighborhood” is to visit the site you’re considering linking to and then look up at the PageRank portion of the Google toolbar which is what the red arrow is pointing to in the image at the bottom of this screen.
The image on this screen shows the PageRank of the Amazon.com website. The mouse is pointed at the PageRank of the toolbar. In this case as I hovered over the PageRank portion of the toolbar I see that Google has assigned Amazon.com a PageRank of 9 out of 10. PageRank is Google’s own assessment of how relevant and important it considers a website to be. In the case of Amazon.com, Google believes that this website is very important. Now, rarely will you see a website actually have a PageRank of 9 as Amazon has. Usually a typical PageRank is right around 2-6.
That said, by using the Google toolbar, I can instantly tell how important Google believes a website to be. While there are a variety of factors that give a website a good or bad PageRank, the age of the website itself being a factor, it still gives me some kind of indication as to the importance of the website.
Now, how do we use this to determine if a website is in a “bad neighborhood”?
All you need to do is visit the site you’re considering linking to and then take a look up at the Google toolbar. If the PageRank portion of the toolbar is grayed out, it most likely means one of two things. One is that Google has not yet visited the site and assigned it a PageRank yet or the website has been banned in Google.
To double-check to see if the site has actually been banned in Google and not just simply waiting to get a PageRank assigned to it, simply visit Google and in the search box enter site:nameofthesiteyouareconsidering.com.
If nothing comes up after you search, then the site has been banned by Google. If something does come up, then the site has NOT been banned by Google; it simply hasn’t received a PageRank yet.
While it’s not always possible to determine if a website is a bad neighborhood to be linking to, this free tool can help give you a good indication of what you should avoid. Above all, don’t make the assumption that just because a company is a large corporation doesn’t mean it can’t be banned. In 2006, a large company was banned because they were caught using Black Hat (illegal) SEO techniques and ended up being completely removed from Google’s index. Regardless of who you are, if you’re caught doing the wrong thing, you will get banned so it never hurts to double-check. Especially since linking to a bad neighborhood can affect where your own website ranks in the search engines.
So now that we’ve covered outbound links, let’s talk about those all-important inbound links. Those links that point TO your site.
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