Off Page Optimization

There are three stages in SEO:

(1) Keyword Research
(2) On Page Optimization
(3) Off Page Optimization

You can have the best keywords and the most perfectly optimized web pages, but if you ignore step (3) you have very little chance of achiving a top ranking for your website. When you search for something on Google and you receive millions of results, have you ever wondered what differentiates the websites on the first page from all the other websites? The answer is backlinks. A backlink is simply a link from another website to your own website and search engines see this as important because a link to a website is like a vote of confidence. The more backlinks your website has, the better chance you have of ranking high in the search engines. A good way of determining how difficult it will be to get a top ranking is to simply: 1) Type your keywords into Google.com (without quotes). 2) Write down the URLs of the websites that are in the top two positions on page one and the top position of page two. 3) Visit any backlink checker tool. 4) Enter the URL of your website and the URL of the three websites that you wrote down. 5) Click the button and you will see how many links your website has compared to your competitors This exercise will let you see how far away you are from achieving a top position on page one or a top position on page two of Google. One thing that is worth remember though, is not all links are equal. Links from higher quality websites are worth more than links from lower quality websites. Google measures quality by something called "Page Rank" or "PR".