The first strategy is what most people already know, and that’s on-page SEO tactics. These include things like keyword inclusion and internal linking within your website. The other side of SEO however (in my opinion) may actually be far more important to improving your search engine rankings and that is, off-page SEO – and it incorporates all of the work that you do to help improve your search engine rankings on other websites and through other sources and mediums throughout the web that link back to your site.

Below are 10 of the most important factors when it comes to off-page SEO and how to improve your search engine rankings. By following these strategies and incorporating them into your SEO game plan I’m confident you will have greater success. All of them will lead to increased results and ultimately, more profitability for your website.

1. Backlinks – The long story short is that the more backlinks you have leading to your website the better your website will rank. This is one of the most important elements of improving your search engine rankings with off page SEO.

2. Backlink Quality – While the more backlinks you have for your website the better, the quality of the backlinks you have also plays a role. Not all links are created equally, and ones that have more inherent value will provide a larger boost to your rankings. High quality links are from related sites, are one-way links meaning you don’t have to link back and are from high ranking sites.

3. Backlink Diversity – In addition to the quantity and quality of backlinks you have leading to your website, the diversity of backlinks you have also plays a role. It will help your rankings much more to have links coming in from numerous sources including blogs, directories, forums, articles, related websites and more than to just have links coming in from one individual class.

4. Backlink Anchor Text – Having a backlink is great, but having a backlink that includes highly targeted anchor text is even better. The anchor text used in a link leading to one of your web pages will help associate that page with the included term. This mans that it’s a great way to improve your rankings for your targeted keywords and key phrases.

5. Age of Domain – The older your domain, or the longer your website has been around, the more highly credible it will be viewed. Therefore having a long established web presence or purchasing an older domain in good standing is a strong and quick way to boost your search engine rankings.

6. Social Networking – The growth of social networking has been extremely high, and it’s a great way to improve your off-page SEO. You can build a large and diverse amount of backlinks to your site but you will also be able to reach out and connect with more prospects and potential customers and clients. Your participation will help lead to an increased web presence and stronger results across the board.

7. Visitor Quality and Interaction – Something that is often overlooked is the fact the way visitors interact with your site can affect your SEO and Google rankings. Your goal is to lower your bounce rate as much as possible, which shows that when people find your page, they like what they see and find it relevant. This will help boost your reputation and credibility within the search engine algorithms.

8. Sources of Traffic – Another thing to remember is that the sources of traffic for your website can also play a role in your standing. This is because there are both good and bad “neighborhoods” on the web, and if a lot of your traffic comes from bad sources that will reflect negatively upon your site. However, strong sources of traffic from related and legitimate sources will help to further prove your validity.

9. Traffic History – You need to think about website development as a gradual process. That means that you should be gradually and continually adding more pages and content, while gradually and continually adding more links and so on. A sudden, large boost can signal some sketchy behavior, and can end up costing you some position in the Google rankings. Therefore take your time and build slowly, naturally and continually.

10. Web Directories – Web directories are not as valuable as they once were for your Google rankings but inclusion in the top directories can still provide a solid boost and they still work great for additional link juice. Don’t worry about being listed in hundreds or thousands of directories with little to no value and instead focus on getting included in just a handful of the top directory sites.

There are many different off-page SEO factors that you can use to improve search engine rankings and your overall online success. The above 10 are just a starting point to help get you involved in what is necessary to improve your success without ever needing to touch your page or worry about anything in that domain of SEO.

In today’s world off online marketing (off-page SEO) is just as important as on-page SEO, and perhaps could even be more important – in fact, I would go as far to say that it IS more important. So, if  you want to improve your success with the search engines, it’s of the utmost importance that you follow the above SEO strategies.

Please let me know your thoughts, I’d be very interested to know what you can add to this list?

Several Top Off-Page SEO and Link Building Tools That I Use Regularly

Bookmarking Demon – Arguably the most powerful bookmarking software available – simply bookmark all your pages with this tool and watch your pages rank fast.

Unique Article Wizard – Submit a unique article to hundreds of blogs and directories to generate hundreds (or thousands) of quality backlinks to your site

Smart Media Innovations Pty Ltd – A professional link building company offering great “do it for you” SEO services

Now, these might seem a little basic at first but it’s surprising how many people I see out there who fail to implement even the most basic of banner structures. If you can begin to start implementing these in your campaigns I’m quite positive your click-throughs will begin to improve.

Employ Action Words

Use action words like “FREE” and “Click Here” in your banners with an actual press here button graphic on your banner.

By offering something “FREE” in your message incentivises the reader to click on your banner.

Banners with “Click Here” teasers and similar action phrases are a simple way to increase click-throughs.

Use Punchy Headlines

A short and punchy banner headline makes a world of difference. Always load your headline with benefit driven statements – offer solutions to the challenges that your customers face.

If you sell diet products, try “Lose 10 pounds in four weeks FREE!”. Work on a winning combination of text and graphics in your banner ad and you’re bound to see improvements.

Animated Banners vs. Static Banners

Animated banners almost always outperform their static counterparts by more than 100%. Internet surfers are more likely to notice banners that are animated, as apposed to static. Example: If you have the words “Click Here” flashing in your banner, it will perform better than a static version.

Adopt Better Designs

Many of us are not graphic artists. We can create simple banners but it is hard to match the work of a professional graphic artist. You should engage a professional banner ad designer to create your banners. Expect to invest $50-80 per banner.

The standard sizes for banner ads are 728×90 pixels, 300×250pixels and 468×60 pixels. I recommend that you aim to design a medium rectangle first (300×250pixels) and aim to make this one work before experimenting with the others as this size has proven to be the most effective. But as always, test test test. If you aren’t testing and tracking your metrics, you may be losing out. Every site is different and what works on one site my not work for another.

Try Trick Banners

These banners resemble Windows dialog boxes, scroll bars, submit buttons or blue-coloured underlined hyperlinks. They attract you to click on the dialog boxes and scroll bars – which you are already accustomed to doing with the Windows operating system. If you use trick banners with short and punchy headlines, you can get click-throughs above 10.0%!

Reduce Your Banner File Sizes

Aim to reduce your banner file size to less than 15k. The last thing a surfer wants is a slow-loading webpage. Most websites and banner exchanges do not allow excessively large banners anyway, so it’s good practice to do this with each and every banner you create. Simply optimize your banner file size through your graphic software or an online graphic optimizer.

Rotate Your Banners Regularly

Always have 2 or more banners to promote each product. A banner usually burns out after a surfer has seen it 3 times. They will ignore (if not hate) banners which they see repeatedly. If your click-through is steadily declining, then it is time to rotate your banners and throw something new out. Always keep your market entertained.

Target Your Banners

Place your banners on websites visited by your potential customers. If you promote gourmet coffees, place your banners on sites targeted at gourmet coffee drinkers. The quality of leads generated are higher, and more likely to result in sales.

Running your banners on targeted sites generally yield higher click-throughs and ROI. You are reaching people who are most interested in what you have to offer. Of course, you can try websites with general audience if they generate substantial ROI.

Monitor Your Banners’ Performance

Make it a point to check on your banners’ performance every few days. Monitor the click-through rate. The click-through tells you how well your banner performs. Most banners fetch a click-through of between 0.8% to 2.0%. If your banner gets more than 2.0%, it is doing a pretty well.

By monitoring your banners’ performance, you can kill under-performing banners before they waste away your advertising dollars. Keep testing, and always aim to beat your control.

Do Your Mathematics

Do your mathematics for each banner advertising campaign. Calculate the cost-per-visitor, cost-per-sale and return-on-investment ratios.

For example: If a website charges you $20 per thousand impressions ($20/CPM), and you get a 2.0% click-through (20 visitors), your cost-per-visitor is $1.00 ($20 / 20 visitors).

And if 1 in every 10 visitors buys your product, your cost-per-sale is $10.00 ($20 / 2 sales).

So if each sale of your product produces a gross profit of $15, then your net profit per-sale will be $5.00 ($15 gross profit – $10 cost-per-sale).

Your return-on-investment, before non-marketing expenses, is 50.0% ($10.00 total net profits / $20 investment). This campaign is profitable!

In conclusion, always try to advertise on different sites with different banners and with the purpose of trying to find a winning combination that can yield the highest ROI. Comparing Deal A which yields an ROI of 20% to Deal B that yields 60%, your advertising dollars work three times harder (and profitable) with Deal B!

If you have more to add to this list I would love to hear them. Please make a comment below and let me know your thoughts.

To higher profits!

For creating your own simple banner ads FREE, I recommend http://www.bannercreator.nu/banner-maker.html and/or http://www.animationonline.com/

For hiring an expert to create profressional looking banners for you, I recommend http://99designs.com/

If you are an affiliate and want to discover the amazing traffic secrets super affiliates and top fortune 500 companies use to flood their websites with cheap high converting clicks using banner ads, I highly recommend Banner Ad Blueprint

It doesn’t matter if they were promoting CPA offers, Clickbank products or their own product or website.

The problem is that Google’s emails simply don’t tell people why they have been banned and it seems calling or emailing Google to find out why is fat waste of time.

They’re just not responding or answering to any questions so it seems to me that they really just don’t care.

This ban has not been limited to people running rebill offers but rather a mix of accounts promoting anything from Clickbank products, CPA offers, poor landing pages, and their own products etc. In fact, I heard one company had been spending over a million dollars a year with Google Adwords selling their own coffee product and banned without explanation.

Regardless of all this, Google only accounts for 15% of all Internet traffic which might seem surprising to many website owners but what this means is there is a whole other world of traffic out there to drive leads to your business.

Now, sure it isn’t all that hard to create a new Adwords account (with some work)

1. Find a new computer

2. Purchase a new IP address

3. Open a new Adwords account under a new name and new credit card with a different name and address (i.e. mother-in-law?)

With the above being said, it appears that affiliate marketing on Google Adwords is dying a slow death and pay per click marketers need to start evolving their businesses outside of Google Adwords.

I recommend exploring other traffic courses such as media buys, ppv, natural seo, and video marketing doesn’t hurt either. Because as I said, Google represents just a small fraction of the traffic available online.

One of the best things about the above methods is that there are little or no campaign restrictions and alomost zero chance of having your account deleted, unlike Google.

I myself will be reducing my Google monthly spend to about 10% of my total monthly ad spend and focusing on heavily expanding out with other pay per click search engines and pay per view traffic sources.

If Google simply worked with their customers to clean up poor advertisements (i.e. removing flogs, etc.), they would still have a lot of loyalty from their advertisers. But for now, it seems more and more advertisers are just getting tired of these shenanigans, and those who do stick around with Google, in my mind, are just wasting their time and money in doing so.. because Google Adwords is fast becoming THE MOST expensive form of advertising, anyway.

All good things come to an end.

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