Online Marketing Article
Off-Site Optimization - Linking Strategies

Off-site Optimization has everything to do with links.  It refers to any and all attempts to gain attention to your site from an outside source by pointing people and search engines to your site.  This includes such things as reciprocal or multi-way linking strategies, directory submissions, forum and blog posts, press releases and article submissions.   

Campaigns such as Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Yellow pages are not normally considered part of an optimization program.  These would fall under the heading of straight advertising.  However, these are an important part of your overall marketing strategy. 

In an off-site optimization plan you are trying to do two main things.  You want the search engines to find your site through many links coming from other relevant, highly ranked, quality sites.  The other goal of off-site optimization is to reach large numbers of interested, qualified visitors getting them to your site.   

This off-site optimizing has all to do with how and where you can place links pointing toward your site.  In the ‘mind’ of the Google robots or spiders the value and importance of a web page is directly proportional to the importance of those pages linking to it.  Therefore, obviously, a link going to your site from Yahoo would have more value than one from a friend’s vacation blog. 

One way of getting links to your site is to send out press releases.  I have not done much research in this area.  However, my understanding is that http://prweb.com is a quality press release site.  You can also just type “press releases” into one of the major search engines and come up with dozens of sites to explore.  If you want your press release to do the most work for you make sure it is actually news – something new and interesting – not just an advertisement. 

Reciprocal linking used to be a mainstay of optimization.  This was a technique where site A would link to site B and site B would link back to A.  However, due to the fact that reciprocal linking as a technique has been prone to misuse and spamming it has recently been giving way to multi-way linking strategies.  In a multi-way linking system no two sites link reciprocally.   

Monthly directory submissions are an inexpensive process for increasing incoming non-reciprocal links. 

Writing articles about your area of expertise and submitting these to article submission services is another good way of attracting attention and links to your site.