Off-Page SEO strategies

Off-Page SEO strategies - Perhaps you'll be a little surprised, but off-page optimization starts with the content (which is the king, as you remember). The very first step you should accomplish before starting any link building is quality content. Remember, it is much easier to get a link onto some amazingly creative or informative article rather than onto a scanty set of trivialities. Deliver the content and the qualtiy backlinks will become much more closer to you than you think.
 
Nevertheless, the content alone is not enough. You still need to put some efforts into your link building strategy. Here is the rough step-by-step:

1. Know your product
   Seems stupid at first, isn't it? But surprisingly many people all over the world simply do not know what do they offer! They simply cannot explain what they sell, what product they deal with, what's its features, why do other people need this product and what differs this product from other 2567 products of that kind. They simply do not know. But you must know that! Think of your product or service. What's unique in it? How can it help others? Who are your potential customers? You see, you cannot offer your services or products to some average and faceless customers. You must clearly understand who your customers are and why do they need you product. Start with that, figure it out for yourself, then formulate it into words to explain this for other people as well.
2. Set objectives
   Now as you know who are your target audience, you should set the objectives - what is the purpose for you in reaching that audience? Money? Fun? Word of mouth? Fame? Popularity? Why do you need those people linking to your site? Spare a few minutes (or maybe few days) onto thinking of it - that's worth it. Without that answer you won't succeed.
3. Research
   The next vital step is research. Before diving into the link building, you should gather as much information on the market as you can. The key to the success is information. But the value of the info is inverse of its age. So investigate the market, find the fresh info on your theme, conduct some personal researches or experiments if needed, talk with specialists in your industry - that's all count. What's the point in writing an article if the story it tells to your potential buyers is old as your granny? Well, of course, there is always someone who didn't hear it yet, but some recent news will attract much more interest anyway and that mean much more inbound links too.
   
   You should also probe the market - what is popular, what are alternatives, how much does it cost, what are the bottle-necks, what's the ROI and so on and so further. Base your link building strategy on the current trends of the market in your niche. 
4. Build content
   As it was said above, the quality content opens the door to many inbound links to your site. At this step you should already know who are your potential visitors, who do you target, what objectives do you pursue and so on. Also you have a handful of great, freshly squeezed information. Now it is time to clothe all of this into tasty marketing texts. If you can do it with your own strengths - that's great, do it! If you cannot write persuasive selling copy yourself - hire someone who can.
5. Acquire links
   You can refer to the above part to learn what works in the current off-page optimization world and what not. One of the today's buzz words is link baiting. The term describes the way how the links are acquired. The technique does not intend to ask webmasters to put a link to you, instead it encourages them to do that. Just like the fisherman baits a fish to the hook, you can bait a webmaster with your website. Why whould a webmaster want to link to you? Because your site has some value. Because it provides some services that others do not. Because it has unique content. Because it is funny. Because it's authoritative and trustworthy. There are plenty of possible reasons. But what common about them is: the link bait is never an easy money! You need to thought it out well. The bait needs to be well researched. It must fill some gap in the market to attract high value links.
   
   Don't think of acquiring links as a part-time job. Treat it as something big, something that takes all of your efforts and something that you would be proud of when it would be done. Then it will amaze other people. Then it will attract their attention. Then webmasters will be happy to put a link to you.
   
   Ok, let's suppose you have written a good content, but how do you promote it? How do you make others link to it? Where to start from? The best place to start is other resources at your theme - forums, personal blogs, some authority sites in your field etc. You could also research your competitors and find who links to them and why. Try to suggest better solution (read: your solution) to them. If you have a mass product - try offering it to respected bloggers for free. By the way, some free stuff always helps to get a link or two. For instance, simply by reading this tutorial you have already learned the secret coupon code for 40% discount on any products by CleverStat: CLEV-45S0-SFAQ (simply type it into the order form). Obviously, you'll want to tell your friends about this secret offer, or make a post in your blog: "hey, they hide a nice promo-code in this SEO FAQ (by the way, it is good too)". Hope you got the idea. If you made a tool - ask others to test it for bugs, if you write an article - ask for a review etc. People are often eager to help, why not let them?
6. Keep working
   Once again, as soon as you got some results of your link campaign (or even if you didn't get any) - do not stop. Keep working. Repeat the steps 1-5. Build content, acquire links and then build content again. 
   
   Learn new tricks, read industry news, interview interesting persons (why not?), communicate with related sites of your field. SEO is dynamics. Every day something happens and your website is better to reflect the changes, otherwise your competitors do that.

A. Tracking the results

One of the most common mistakes a newbie webmaster makes is the constant tracking of the SERPs. Yeah, I agree there is something magical, something hypnotic in it - seeing as your site slowly climbs up (oh, yeah!) the SERPs or suddenly falls down (oh, no!) and then raises again. It is a very captivating for sure, but absolutely useless process. Believe me, you don't need to check how well your site is doing every 10 minutes. Moreover, you should not do that even once a day. I am sorry for such rude comparison, but checking your website rankings is just like masturbation - when you're ok you simply don't need it. 

Of course, you do want to know the positions of your website. But that info is not crucial, you better spend your time writing another page for your site, or contacting another blogger for links. Checking your SERP positions once a week is ok. And you also do not want to check them for all 100 result pages down. Forget it. If your SERP is located below the first 30 results - nobody will open it ever. There're billions of websites all over the web and the number grows constantly, why would I spend my valuable time to digg into SERPs below the first page? Well, may be if I'd be very eager to find something, I'd probably looked two or three pages more, but that's all - afterwards I'd either open one of the top sites, or paraphrase my query. 

The other popular question here is - whether one should use some tool to check search engine position or do that manually? Both points have its strengths and weaknesses. Obviously, you cannot afford to track the results manually if you have a bulk load of keywords. Let's suppose you can check one keyword in 30 seconds: open Google, type the keyword, hit enter, quickly screen the SERPs, proceed to the next keyword. Then, for 100 keywords it would take 50 minutes! Almost an hour of tedious repeating work. No, thank you. From the other hand, checking the ranking with some tool also has its disadvantages: tools often lie, show incorrect or inaccurate info, they also may lead to a ban of your IP address if the amount of terms to check is significant. So, what to choose? That's depend on your vision and the needs of your business. You may prefer rare and accurate manual checks if the amount of target keywords is rather small, or choose some tool to save a couple of hours if the list of keywords is rather long.

The summary of this part is simple:

1. Check your web rankings rarely, once a week or so.
2. Check the first 30-50 results only.
3. If your website is not found within that depth - you're not performing well and need to double your efforts.
4. You can check your ranking by hand in a browser, or prefer a tool or software - that depends on your business needs.

B. Help! I've lost my rankings!

First of all - don't panic! There are plenty of possible reasons for the lost of positions and not all of them are results of Google penalty.

1. Your competitors are not sleeping
   This is a very common situation actually. You think that your site has lost its rank, while in fact it's your competitors' sites gained it. Usually, the amount of drop is not significant, few positions down or so, but depending on the intensity of your previous months work it may drop even more. Remember, SEO is not sprint, it is marathon. 
2. Some of your inbound links were filtered out or devalued
   This happens when you got many links and then Google devalued them. Your link strength has greatly decreased and your rankings have dropped. If you read the off-page sectioncarefully, you know that links don't have the same value. Some are more valued than others and the value of a link highly depends on the value of a linking website. So if the quality of that website falls down for some reason - so does the value of link to your site. 
   
   For instance, you may had many links from reciprocal partners and all went good, but the partner sites placed more and more links to the same page and finally your link has become simply one of the many, receiving only a small portion of the link juice - that's devalueing. The links also could be devalued by Google. If it founds that a link is irrelevant or bad quality, it reduces its initial value or filter it out completely.
   
   Devalueing may result in significant loss of rankings at once, or in a slow yet constant loss of positions over time. Gathering high-PR links from relevant websites reduces the risk of such issue to the minimum.
3. New ranking algorithm introduced
   Very similar to the above. Each ranking factor, either off-page or on-page has some value assigned to it somehwere inside Google's algos. If Google introduces some new algorithm or made some changes with the next update - all sites get evaluated according this new algo and their ranking is updated accordingly. Some of them could raise up during the update while others could fall down. 
   
   The key point here is that Google does not want to put somebody's sites down. It has no interest in it. The purpose of such update is to increase the quality of a search, so the best strategy to survive any Google algo update is to use high-quality links and whitehat methods of SEO. If you don't mess up with some doubtful SEO, if you have good neighbourhood, and if you obtain only high-quality links from relevant sources - you will not lose your positions, or even increase them thanks to those unlucky guys who didn't manage to read this tutorial carefully and therefore lost their rankings and freed some space in the SERPs for you. 
4. On-site problems
   We all make mistakes, so sometime the issue is not Google, but your own site. The most common case is when you buy a new domain name and transfer your website to it, but do not setup a redirect ftom the old one correctly. So the links are now pointing to non-existing pages and Google has no other choice but remove them from the index. The other common situation happens when your hosting provider changes some script execution rules and your dynamic pages suddenly stop working returning with 404 or 503 or any other server-side error. If your ranking are going down - check your website first. 
5. Penalty
   What is penalty? It is a kind of damping factor applied to your rankings. How does one know if his site is penalized? No way. Your site may be penalized right at this time and you don't know it. You should understand though that not every loss of rankings is a penalty! However, Google does penalize sites that use blackhat SEO techniques such as hidden links, keyword stuffing or having bad link neighbourhood or irrelevant links. There is no artificial penalties made for the only sake of dropping some sites down. Google is about search, and it worries about search, not about putting some site higher or lower in rankings. So if your site has received a penalty you should ask yourself, why Google thinks that my site is not relevant to that query? Is this something about my content? Is this those links I bought last month? There is always a reason. Here are some more tips from Google:My site isn't doing well in search.
6. Site is banned
   What is ban? When your site gets excluded from the index of a search engine - that is ban. How does one know if his site is banned? Simply. Type site:mysite.com query in the Google search box, where mysite.com is the URL of your site. If you don't see any results then - congratulations, your site is either banned, or has never been crawled (true for brand new sites). Why would Google ban a site? Mostly, because that site violates Google Webmaster Guidelines or uses blackhat SEO methods. How can one bring the site back to Google index? Step one: remove all blackhat stuff from your website. Step two: submit your site to Google again.