Off page optimization

As part of our daily SEO work for our clients we usually focus around what is called the “on page” optimization. Meaning the keyword density, outgoing links, meta tags, image alt tags and other factors that can influence the site’s indexing. There are, however, quite a few other factors that can influence the SEO efforts as well, and those are part of the “off page” optimization.

When we use the term Off Page optimization we usually mean the inbound links that point to our site, their text, strength and so on. But there are other off page issues that we need to consider when optimizing a website/web page. These are the technical issues that rise from how the site is built, hosted and used.

Page load time, for example, is a very important factor in determening how many pages on your site will be craweled by the search engines bots (mainly Google’s).

From Google Webmaster Tools tour:

Help Google better crawl your site:

The first step in increasing your site’s visibility on Google is learning how we crawl and index your site.

Crawl Info: Learn how to make sure we have access to your site, and see when Googlebot last visited. You can also view URLs that we’ve had trouble crawling and find out why we couldn’t crawl them. That way, you can fix any problems preventing us from indexing all of your pages. 

Other factors include things like redirects, not found pages, html validation and more.

The technical aspect of the SEO process can be very easily overlooked. Quite often it may seem that logging into the Google webmaster tools is not as important as strong links building or improving meta tags and keywords on the site.

Attending to the technical issues of the site can give your site that extra push it needs to beat the competition to that coveted first place in the search engines rankings.