Let’s face it, without an audience you’re screwed and you will never make any money online. It doesn’t matter how great your product or service is.  If you don’t have an audience, you don’t have traffic, you don’t have customers and you certainly don’t have sales.

To get an audience you must know the off-page factors, or strategies done off the pages of a website that Google uses to rank in order to rank websites.

Here’s a list of the top 30 off-page search engine optimization techniques Internet marketing experts feel affects a sites Google (and other search engines) Ranking:

POSITIVE FACTORS (You want to try to make sure you can adhere to as many of these as possible)

1.      Focus on getting a high number of quality inbound links from high Page Rank sites.

2.      Aim to have incoming links from high ranking pages.

3.      Seek links from authority sites.

4.      Google will look at the anchor texts of the inbound links to your site, try to have them related.

5.      The age of the link is important, the older the better.

6.      The more popular the referring page, the better.

7.      Make sure the number of outgoing links to the referrer page isn’t very high, too many can make your site look less important.

8.      Strive to position the link on the referrer page as early as possible.

9.      The keyword density on the referring page does matter, however it’s hard to have too much influence on this factor.

10.  The HTML title of the referrer page. You want to have the same subject/theme as they do.

11.  The referrer page has the same or related theme.

12.  Your site is listed in the DMOZ Directory, http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

13.  Your site is listed in the Yahoo Directory ($299 per year)

14.  Your site is listed in the top directories. The more directories that link to you the better.

15.  The age of the site that links to you. You want old, long-established.

16.  There is a temporary boost for new sites, however this boost only lasts for a couple of weeks.

17.  Does the site directory have a tree structure? Google wants a logical, consistent, conventional structure.

18.  Is the site map complete and does it have keywords in the anchor text?

19.  The size of the site. There is debate on this topic. Some say bigger is better, while others think fewer pages could now be better.

20.  Does the site have a theme or are there many unrelated words?

21.  Google will look at your page traffic;

a.       The number of visitors. More visitors= more relevant.

b.      Is there an increasing trend? We want a site that is growing.

c.       How often is one of your pages clicked on? The higher the better.

d.      How long does someone spend on a page? The longer the better.

e.       The number of times a user bookmarks your page. The more often, the better.

f.       How recently did someone bookmark your page? The more recent, the better.

g.      How did visitors leave your page?

22.  How long is your domain registered? Legitimate domains are often paid for several years in advance, while illegitimate domains are rarely used for longer than a year.

23.  Are the sites you associate with legitimate? If you own all the sites or if they are spammy, not good.

NEGATIVE FACTORS (You want to try to make sure your site doesn’t have any of these factors)

24.  Have you paid a company for traffic? Most likely it will be low quality traffic. Google does not reward link buying.

25.  Google will use temporal link analysis to see if there is a trend of consistent incoming links. You don’t want tons of links one day and zero the next.

26.  Your site has zero links to you. Google wants you to have at least one backlink.

27.  Never implement cloaking, which is when you show one webpage to a search engine spider and another webpage to everybody else.

28.  Google says that links coming from bad sites can’t affect you because you have no control; however some experts suggest it will hurt you.

29.  If you violate Google’s Terms of Service (TOS) prepare to be penalized. For example, if I searched for my site www.billioniarebythirty.com 150 times a day.

30.  How reliable is your server. Make sure you have a top notch server that never drops.

Having a basic understanding of how does Google works is extremely important. While it is very difficult to adhere to every factor, keep them in mind while creating and optimizing your site.

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