SEO: Where Do We Go From Here?

Okay, so you signed up for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and GooglePlus, and put together your nifty profiles and company pages. You visit and update them often, send out tweets, change statuses, and basically do everything a productive and contributing citizen of the online community is expected to do. Now what? Where do you go from here? It’s time to expand your reach and improve off-page SEO.

Off-Page SEO takes you beyond social media profiles

What’s Off-Page SEO?

Search Engine Optimization can be broken down into two distinctive types: on-page and off-page. On-page SEO deals with optimizing your internal links, acquiring fresh and interest content for your pages, and incorporating 404 pages that bring you more traffic. On the other hand, off-page SEO is, well, it’s what we’re covering here. Take a look at some of these strategies:

Social Bookmarking

Visit some of the more popular social bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious, and take advantage of them. Make an effort to show restraint in your use of tags; make sure they are on topic. This strategy is a mixed blessing, so you have to tread carefully. The problem with social bookmarking is that many people spam these sites, and you don’t want to be painted with that brush.

Seek Out Common Interests

Consider joining a social network that is geared towards your vocation or avocation. For instance, Christian pastors may connect with a site like oneplace.com, much in the way that Ed Young Jr Fellowship Church has done.

Links Galore!

There are a couple of ways you can use links to boost your visibility. Remember that search engines like Google are scrutinizing the whole aspect of links and how they are gathered and used, so be careful. Avoid black-hat SEO; don’t go over to the Dark Side.

• Cross-Linking
  This has nothing to do with angry links (though it’d be cool if it did). Link to internal pages within your site. Doing so boosts your internal link popularity. This is an effective way of making Google Page Rank algorithms actually work in your favor.
• Link Baiting
  If you use another site’s content on your own site, make sure to include a link back to the original site. Ideally, that practice will be reciprocated, thereby increasing your own visibility. A warning here: you can include dozens of links to other sites but it doesn’t guarantee that the favor will be returned. But the better your content, the more likely it will happen.
• Link Exchange
  Similar to web rings, you register your site with an exchange, and in return you place a banner advertisement on your page calling out the websites of the other members.

When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Go Shopping

If you offer actual goods and/or have an e-commerce website, you can submit your products to a variety of social shopping network sites like Kaboodle, Buzz Shout, MSN Online Shopping, or Yahoo Online Shopping. This is a good way to brand and advertise your products, and it doesn’t cost you a thing!

Smile For The Camera

Consider uploading photos of your products (or perhaps even some nifty behind the scenes shots of your business) to sites such as Flickr or PhotoBucket. Let people get a good look at what you’re all about.

While there are certainly more ways of doing off-page SEO, this is a respectable sampling that will get you heading in the right direction.

Photo Credit: SEOPlanter