Dave:     Yeah, no worries. The off-page factors really are the major components when it comes to search. When you talk about a pie, you’d probably say 20% of that SEO pie and the chances of you coming up in the Google rankings is about 20% on-page, but the 80% of that pie, the factors that are the most important are going to be what we talk about now, which is off-page SEO.

That has all to do with the quality of the links that you’re building back to your website. This is kind of my bread and butter. There’s plenty of ways that you can take this to the next level [inaudible] operating those more competition niches to do with stock market related stuff.

Obviously I need to super charge all of this, but for 99% of people who are listening to this, the few tips that I can give you now to make sure that you build these good quality links will set you head and shoulders above the rest.

The first thing that you need to know is when you’re building links to your website, it’s important to make sure you build links with the appropriate anchor text. You’re linking back to your website on all of these other websites back to your website with the right keywords that you’re trying to rank a particular page for.

Let’s say, for example, this SEO services page you can see, the keyword that we’re looking to rank here is SEO company. SEO company is the keyword that we’re optimizing this particular page for. Now when we send all of the inbound links back to this website, it’s important that the anchor say the right thing.

This is one of the really good ways to build links back. In fact, this is probably one of the first places that you want to get started.

Gideon:    You create articles in Ezine Articles and link back to your page?

Dave:    Yeah. As part of off-page optimization, you want to make sure that you’re building links back to your website with the appropriate anchor text. The anchor text is the keyword there.

I’m linking back to a specific page, and then that keyword that I’m linking with is the keyword that I’m trying to optimize and rank that particular page for.

What I’m going to talk about is all of the different ways and methods you could go about building as many of these links back to your website from high quality sites back to your website, which will ultimately end up helping it rank.

Gideon:    Awesome.

Dave:    The first thing that I’d suggest is you head over to something called Directory Maximizer. That’s a good relatively cheap way to start getting some inbound links. I think they charge like $0.06 a link for directory submissions. We’ll just go to here and you can go ahead and for a small fee you can have your website hand-submitted to 200-odd directories.

From an actual benefit of the inbound links, you’re not necessarily getting really high quality inbound links here. The reason we do Directory Maximizer or directory submissions first is because we’re building a whole lot of links back to our website with our URL as the anchor text.

When they submit using Directory Maximizer, they actually send a whole lot of links back to your website with your URL. See here? www.MelbourneSEOServices.com. That will build a whole lot of back links back to your site with your URL.

The reason we do that is it looks natural to the search engines. Obviously, Google doesn’t like the idea of people gaming their search engine, so when we do anything with link building you want to make sure that you replicate what happens in nature.

It’s natural for people to link back to your website with your URL. We use Directory Maximizer to build a whole lot of inbound links back to your site with the URL so that when we start our really specific direct linking campaigns like this, SEO company, it’s offset by also having a lot of links back to your website with the URL. It just looks more natural.

Start off with Directory Maximizer, then head over to Ezine Articles and open yourself up an account. It’s free. It doesn’t cost anything. Then go ahead and submit maybe 10 articles and just send links. You might pick out 10 pages that you’ve created as optimized and send specific links back to those pages, and you’ll also send some links back to your home page as well.

That’s probably where I’d start. Director Maximizer, then Ezine Articles, then SEO on the cheap. There’s a whole lot of different ways that you can do it. You can purchase different services that will give you access to different blog networks and things like that.

They’re a little bit gray hat and a little bit more frowned upon, a little bit more dodgy. You do need to make sure when you head down that path that you’re choosing networks where you know that the person behind the network has a good understanding of SEO so they don’t do anything that’s going to get you into trouble. If you are going to head down that path, just offset it with really good white hat, good clean link building strategies.

I’m talking about directories. That’s fine. That’s good clean stuff. Submitting to Ezine Articles, good clean stuff.

The other thing that you want to do is set yourself up some Google alerts and use something like Google Reader so you can monitor what’s going in your particular niche, and then monitoring keywords and things like that that are associated to whatever you’re working on, and then you can get notification when different blogs are having discussions.

I would head over to those blogs and join in the discussion and build links back to your website, because when you post a comment on a site, as all bloggers know, you often get the option to enter in your name and also your URL, and you’re building some of those inbound links back to your website while also involving yourself in the community.

There are a few other things you can do. To get a really good hit, this is something that we did for our Melbourne SEO Services when we first launched it. We ran this little video. I talked about it here, this Google versus Yellow Pages, a bit of a  viral marketing type thing.

We created a press release for it. We used PR Web to do that, and a really good way to create a press release is to run some sort of survey. If you’ve got a blog, survey your members about what’s important in your particular niche, create a survey, and then you can create a press release around that particular survey.

If we go “Google versus Yellow Pages,” I’m just going to go up to News here and just see if we can find it. We’re still on page one. You can see here. This our press release. We’ll head over here and we listed it on www.PRWeb.com. You can see that. Here’s our press release.

What I wanted to show you is we embedded a whole lot of inbound links. You can see down at the bottom here, Melbourne SEO Services, search engine company and a few other links, right?

If we go ahead and copy the title tag of this particular post, I’m going to head over to Google and we’ll post this into Google. We’ll put quotes around it and we’ll hit search. It’s a pretty unique title and you can see at the moment – wow, it’s popped up since I last looked at it, 2,330 results.

Not all of them are going to necessarily be specifically my thing, but quite a lot of them are. You can see Melbourne SEO Services, new survey data, that’s me. A lot of these places are republishing my content.

If I click on one, let’s just hope that this happens since we’re all doing this on the fly. That’s good,  they’ve included and left all of the links, so I’m getting all of those links back to my website, SEO Blog.

Basically for a cost of a couple hundred bucks – or actually I think we did the highest one because we also wanted to embed videos – so it was about $360. We just got so many inbound links back to our website.

Gideon:    That’s from PR Web, right?

Dave:    That’s PR Web.

Gideon:    You pay them a bit of money and you can do this press release which then allows people to copy it and put it on their sites or whatever and get us back links. Nice.