It is clear that off-page is a less controllable element of SEO campaign, but it makes a significant difference to our rankings. Major search engines actually place about 90 percent of emphasis on off-page optimization. It means that off-page optimization could mean a difference between raking on the first page or on the thousandth page, regardless of how good our content is. It means that we should focus much of our SEO effort on off-page optimization. For SEO professionals, the most important thing about off-page optimization is the number of external links that link to their website. This is also known as link popularity and can be an essential factor that determines our position on search engines. Link popularity is about how many websites that link to our website.
Since its first establishment, Google places a strong emphasis on genuine links that are directed to specific websites. The more natural links we have, the more important our website is to other people. It means that we should try to secure many links from other websites. The most advisable way to gain genuine links is by creating impressive content that’s not available in other websites. The next step is to inform people about the presence of our content in forums, social media and other platforms. More and more people will visit our website to read our unique and interesting content. Eventually, we get links from people who want to recommend our website to others. Clearly, this is a slower method, but many SEO professionals want to get faster results.
If we have interesting content, we can contact websites with relevant niche and write to the owners about our intention to form a network with them. In this case, we could endorse one another’s website and put reciprocal links. However, Google and major search engines consider reciprocal links as artificial and they would have less value than genuine, one-way links. But, if our website is full of valuable resources and informative content, people would be more than happy to recommend our website to others by adding one-way links in their websites, although we never contact them. Many websites are able to reach a critical mass by getting dozens or hundreds of genuine links, because their websites are known as being informative and unique.
Another thing that we should consider that links should arrive from highly relevant websites. If we have a website related to mobile gadgets, it would be a bad idea gathering links from websites on clothing and apparel. Links from unrelated websites could have minimal or no values; so this would be a waste of valuable time and money. Websites that get plenty of genuine links from relevant websites will have higher PageRank. It is Google’s way of determining the value of a website, with a scale ranging from one to ten. Links from relevant websites with higher PageRank will be more valuable than from websites with PageRank 0 or 1. Links should also originate from different IP address.