Off-page SEO basically consists of building links back to your site from other sites.  Google used to like reciprocal links.  (You link to my site, and I link back to yours).  But once the black-hat guys got ahold of this idea, they abused it by building reciprocal link farms with thousands of reciprocal links.  I don’t think reciprocal links will hurt you… in other words, Google won’t slap you if you do it (unless you throw up a hundred backlinks overnight).  But they place a lower weight on reciprocal links than other, higher quality links.

There are two reasons to get backlinks:

1. To encourage people in your service area to click on the link, and land on your website.
2. To build Googlejuice.

If you’re a Realtor, you have a limited, local service area.  You might like to have links on other websites that serve the same local service area.  So that local people might find you on those other local sites, and if they need a Realtor, click to visit your site.

In building Googlejuice, however, the whole WWW is available to you.  It likely doesn’t matter much whether the business where your link exists is down the street, or around the world.

Good links vs. not-so-good links

(In fact, this is a strategy you should be using – I get dozens of clicks from Craigslist ads every month!) So a local Craigslist ad fulfills the first of the two reasons for backlinks given above.

But Craigslist tags all the links in your post as “nofollow”.  When Google finds a nofollow link, it doesn’t count that as a link to your site.  In other words, Craigslist ads build no Googlejuice whatsoever for your site.

A lot of comments on blogs are the same way.  How do you know?  Before you take the time to post a blog comment where you’re hoping for a backlink, do a “View…source” from your browser and check out the other comment posts with links in them.  If there’s not a “nofollow” somewhere near that link, you’re good to go.

Important concepts

There are several basic things to remember about backlinks

1. Anchor text

The anchor text for your backlink is all important .  If you want to rank for “your city…. real estate ”, then that should be the anchor text you use.  (I hope you’ve already read my earlier post on Keyword Research .  If not, you should – before you go any further here.  Until you know what keywords you’re trying to rank for, you’re wasting your time with backlinks).

Backlinks with the name of your website?  Or with your name?  Useless .  Why?  Because if someone already knows the name of your website, or your name, you’re gonna show up in the search results anyway.  You don’t want to waste a valuable backlink to promote your name. I wish I had a dime for every backlink I built with the anchor text www.BobWuest.com before I understood that.

2. Page rank

The higher the page rank of sites that link back to you, the more Googlejuice. A backlink from a PR4 site will carry much higher juice than a backlink from a PR 0 site.

3. Multiple backlinks

I haven’t seen near as much value from building multiple links from one site back to mine.  In other words, if I put a backlink to my website from my blog in every post I do, I’m not seeing that it makes a lot more difference than if I just have one backlink from that URL.  I’m not saying don’t do it… (I do it all the time).  It’s just that building a bunch of backlinks from one site won’t pay off for you as well as spreading them out over multiple sites.  (I think this guideline is useful whether you’re backlinking from your blog, or from a High-PR site like ActiveRain ).

How can you get high-quality backlinks?

Aha grasshopper!  The sixty million dollar question!

There are a number of ways – paid and free .  All of them that have any value to you involve some effort. There are so-called SEO firms that target Realtors, selling massive backlinks in directories.  Waste of money.  The directories are thrown together quickly, have no Googlejuice, and may even hurt your rankings. (See comment at the beginning of this post).

There are a number of directories where you can (and should) list your site for free.  Chief among these is dmoz.org .  DMOZ is hard at work building the world’s largest directory… and Google must think they’re pretty important – it’ll often pull the description from DMOZ as the description beneath your site on the search engine results page.

I’ll go over some of those other directories in another post.  But here’s some other ideas.

How to post a backlink

You’re about to learn just a little HTML here.  I can see the sweat popping out on your brow now. Don’t worry.  It’s easy.  Here’s the format.

<a html=”www.BobWuest.com”>Search the Cincinnati MLS</a>

There’s 3 parts to that there: <a html= - that’s the HTML to tell the browser that a link is coming up “www. BobWuest.com” (without the space in there) that’s the name of your site.  Note that it’s surrounded in double quotes.  Gotta have it. >Search the Cincinnati MLS - The anchor text you want the user (and the search engines) to see. Don’t forget the forward caret. </a> – that tells the browser “that’s all, folks”!

See, it wasn’t that bad, right?

Now, some places where you might want to post won’t allow HTML.  If that’s the case, it’ll just look like what you typed in.  (And your link is no good). But if it allows HTML, you’ll only see the anchor text… usually in blue, and underlined.  If you hover your cursor over it, your website URL will show up in the lower left corner of your browser.  (You probably already knew that).

Enough for now. Check back here for Part 2 on Backlinks… which will give you some good places to get free links.