Off Page Search Engine Optimization with OM4 and Wordpress
How your web pages are treated by the search engines is affected by off page factors as well as on page factors.
This article looks at the most important off site factors.
SEO Rule 1: Get in the search engine index.
When a searcher enters a keyword (or keywords) with a search engine, the search engine has to check its index of web pages, and find the most relevant pages for the search keywords.
If you want your page to appear in the list, you have to be in the index for the search engine. If you aren’t indexed by the search engine, you can’t appear in the results. Just publishing your web page isn’t enough to get it into the indexes.
OM4 websites are designed to make it easy for Google to index them. This includes preparing an XML Sitemap in the format agreed by Google, Ask and Yahoo. The sitemap is updated every time a new post is published, and Google and Ask (and Yahoo, with registration) are notified whenever new posts are created. In addition, blog services such as Technorati are notified each time a post is published.
If you want to see how many of your pages are indexed by Google or Yahoo, go to either search engine and type this in the search box:
site: mysitename.com
Are all your pages indexed? If so, great. Pages that aren’t in the index will never be returned in search results.
Want to see how Google sees your website? Register for the free Google Webmaster service. Once registered, you can get information about how frequently your site is being crawled by the Googlebot, how many pages are indexed, back links registered for your site, what keywords Google sees in your site content and so on. To verify your site with Google Webmaster, you are given a snippet of code to include in your website.
To verify for Google Webmasater, copy the code snippet, go to Dashboard, Site Design, scroll down to the Google Webmaster field, and paste in the code snippet.
SEO Rule 2: Have good back links!
Another big clue the search engines use as to how relevant your web page is are the other web pages that link to you. If 5,000 golfing sites link to your golf page, the search engine will see this as more relevant that another golf page with equally good content, but no ‘back links’.
If two sites both have lots of good back links, a search engine may see the links as more valuable if they have ‘golf’ in the anchor text of the link.
Developing back links is one of the hardest of all SEO tasks. With an OM4 website you have:
- a Blog, so you can post about other bloggers and send Trackbacks or Pingbacks to their site
- multiple ways to review back links – either through Google Analytics reporting or your Wordpress Dashboard reports
- access to the services of a Ghost Blogger to help your write content designed to promote back-links, and to undertake link-building research and campaigns.
You can also seek to have your site included in relevant web directories. DMOZ is the best free directory to get a listing in, however it takes patience. Many search engine specialists recommend that the $300 USD investment to be reviewed for a listing in the Yahoo! directory is the best paid investment you can make in directories. There are many other directories on the web. Many search engine specialists recommend you avoid services that use automated submisssions to directories – we agree.
The Rest of the Rules
The only certainties in life are death, taxation and disagreement over what are the real search engine factors.
If you want to see a lot more detail on this topic, have a read of SEOMOZ Search Ranking Factors.