Off page optimisation

Online Marketing, increasing search engine visibility

It is important for seo specialists concerned with achieving high search engine visibility on a results page to have some understanding of off-page optimisation.

When a search engine returns results to a user's search query a lot of factors are considered to ensure the results are returned in the correct order, not all are contained within the pages returned by the search engine.

Off page optimisation relates to factors that result from things that are not directly included in a website but nevertheless impact a websites visibility on search engine results.

The following off page optimisation factors must be taken into account to achieve high website search engine visibility:


• Link text
• Location metric
• Forward slashes
• Other meta information
• Backlinks
• Google Pagerank

Link Text

The World Wide Web is hypertext, search engines provide considerable auxiliary information on each website in addition to the text of the web pages. An example of this is the link structure and the link text.

An example of link text:

<a href="http://www.here.com/example.html">this is the link text</a>

One well known example of the importance of the link text used in a hypertext link is the phrase "miserable failure". If this phrase is searched for in Google, currently the page returned in position one of the first page is the biography page of George W Bush, the US president.

The phrase "miserable failure" is not contained anywhere within the page, the page is returned only because of a campaign by several webmasters to link to this page using the link text "miserable failure". Points to note are that the searched for phrase does not have much competition, as not many people seem to have pages optimised for the phrase. Also the page as part of the whitehouse.gov website has a high importance, with a Google PageRank of seven, both factors that allow this sort of manipulation of Google in what is known as "Google Bombing".

Google treats link text in a different way to most search engines which associate the link text with the page it resides on. Google also associates the link text with the page it links to, believing that the link text often offers a more accurate description to the page it links to than the actual linked page.