My First Website - Off-Page SEO

After the website and individual pages are created you need to focus on promotion. Promotion is any activity that results in a link back to your website. Getting links at relevant places or authority sites is essential for high ranking. Links have two purposes. The first one is obvious--visitors can follow it to come to your site. But the second one is not so obvious--links are also a measure of page relevancy. They are used by search engines to determine which pages are more important then others.

Getting backlinks is not easy. You need to know few tricks but you also need to be patient. Website promotion is a long term project--the results will not be immediately visible. The best way to track the progress of promoting a website and to monitor the number of backlinks is to use a dedicated SEO software. However, you can still get the number of backlinks with the Yahoo's Site explorer utility. Site explorer lists all links for a website that are known to Yahoo. Usually this represents almost all backlinks for a specific website.

Natural Linking

This is the easiest way to get links. You don't have to do anything except having an interesting page. When people find something interesting on the web they create a link to it on their blog or at any place where other people may find it useful.

Blogs

Most blogs provide a possibility to comment articles where each comment can include a link. Blogs are the easiest way to get links but you should be careful. Do not comment just to get a link. Try to add some useful content to the page.

Forums

Forums also provide a way for discussion about various topics. Usually each user has a possibility to add a signature which may include a link. The same rules valid for blogs also apply here. Do not post useless messages just to get the link. Try to contribute to the discussion.

Articles

Articles provide a great way to promote any website. You have the possibility to write about almost any subject and you can also add links to your website. You can publish articles at many article directories. The only requirement is that you provide some original and useful content.

Unfortunately, there are two types of links. Many links in blogs and forums have the "nofollow" attribute. This property labels them to prevent from being followed by search engines. Another consequence of this attribute is that such links do not count for the PageRank calculation used by Google.