Off-page white hat SEO techniques

Last updated on December 15, 2009. Tags: back link building, off-page SEO, social media optimization, white hat SEO

The search engine optimization techniques that are encouraged by search engines are limited only to those that involve the content and structure of the website. All off-page SEO techniques is all about one thing, backlinks, building more backlinks, building backlinks from high PR site. Since backlinks count as votes used by search engines to determine the importance and authority of a website, we can say then that building backlinks is in fact an exploitation of search engine algorithm.

As I already mentioned in off-page SEO, no one should exert any backlinks as other webmaster should link to your website if they really find their content interesting. However, search engines normally tolerates limited and non-aggressive backlink building if your intention is simply to provide exposure to your site and not to get some PR juice.

With that said, the focus of your off-page SEO effort should not be "generating backlink vote with juice to my site so that my site can go up", but rather drawing traffic from website visitors that are already visiting a high ranking site.

Forum post and forum signatures

When you visit forums, your goal should be in terms of "I am an expert, I'll go around and help people and establish my reputation" and not "I need to generating n number of backlinks today". Look for niche forums that caters to the people who needs the information from your website. For example, in my case, Codeleet is a web development blog and thus, I participate in web developers' and web designer's forum.

Don't waste your time looking for high PR forums that do not insert rel="nofollow" in links. Consider the spill over of PR link juice a bonus but something you can live without. Your main goal is to draw the forums' visitors to your website.

Then, create your signature with backlink to your site. Use short phrases that describe your website as anchor text. For example, I use something like HTML, CSS and WordPress tutorials. This will be great if the forum spills PR link juice because search engines will associate your website with the words in the anchor text, but if not, the people who visit the forum will still be interested in the topic of your website and has a great chance of visiting it (unless of course, you choose the wrong niche).

Some forums do not allow link in signature, some do not have forum signature at all, and there are those that will allow signature and link only after you reached certain post. For these kind of forums, use your member profile instead. Pimp your member profile and include backlinks to your websites. While some forums do not allow links in signature, I haven't seen any forum that does not allow link to the member profile page.

Next, go around the forum, answer questions, ask questions, exchange ideas, establish yourself as an expert. As you do this, people will be interested in knowing more about you and check your profile page. From there, they will be able to see the link to your site. Since you already answered some questions, solved some problems or at least presented a sound opinion, people will crave for more information and visit your site

Blog comments

Similar to forums, blog posts can be powerful in generating backlink votes. That is why spammers invented an automated way of posting comments that contains nothing but backlinks. So in what way are airplane tickets, online casinos and prescription drugs related to .htaccess or image flip?

Similar to forum, they key is to look for blogs related to your niche subjects and post comments. If your website is a blog, it means you need to look for your competitors. Most blog owners are fine with exchanging ideas and most comment forms are even requesting for your website URL even if you're a competitor. However, when you post a comment, make sure that it is a comment, like asking questions about the topic, providing additional information or sharing opinion.

Avoid posting one liners like "hello" or "great post". It makes you look desparate in building backlinks especially if the "name" that you used is a bunch of keywords related to your site. Whenever I see one, I automatically delete it and if it looks like something generated by a robot or a program, I include it in the spam messages.

Note that some blogs require you to sign-up for membership before posting. There are also those that add the nofollow attribute to links. I think this is the default of WordPress because until recently, I didn't know that the comments posted in this blog has a nofollow attribute attached to the link to the commenter's website. Aside from blocking words frequently used by spammers and requiring comment moderation, I didn't configure anything in the comment option.

Other off-page whitehat SEO

Remember the mindset that I am trying to inculcate here. The main point of this post is to focus on building exposure for your website and professional network for yourself. The PR link juice is merely a bonus which you might get but should not be your main goal.

Social networking sites such as Digg, Delicious or StumbleUpon are also said to be useful. In fact, I noticed a significant increase in my traffic (for one day) when I digged one of my post. Several other web developers and SEO experts testified to that (try to search "SEO social sites"), but I am still studying how to use such social sites.

Question and answer sites such as Yahoo answers and Wiki Answers can be useful. Some of their pages tend to top search results. First, sign-up and pimp your profile just like what you did in forums. Next, try searching for queries related to the topic of your website. If one of the question pages top the search results, provide an answer to that question (if still open) and if it's within context, provide a link to one of your post page.

Participate! Don't spam!

You should focus on participating in the community/forum or posting comments with sense in other people's blogs. Avoid posting only one liners such as smileys or something like "nice article" just because you are in hurry to build tons of backlinks. If you hurry in building backlinks, stress will eat you. If you participate, you might meet friends and potential business allies. Under no circumstance you should use a robot for this purpose.

Moreover, a 1000 backlinks per week will be seen by search engines as something out of normal and will penalize you for it. My usual target is 10 to 20 backlinks per week and sometimes, I let go of a week without building backlinks. Other search engine optimizers aim for higher number of backlinks but I do not know the threshold between 20 and 1000 that will trigger the search engines' alarms.

Posted by Greten on May 21, 2009 under Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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