If you’re a small business owner with a website, it’s important to realize that simply having a website doesn’t guarantee that your audience is going to find you. Remember, there are billions of websites out there and no matter what market you’re in, chances are there are hundreds, if not thousands of other competing websites, all vying for your audience’s attention. In order to stand out and receive the most visitors, your website needs to appear on the first page of search results on Google and other search engines. But how do you achieve this? The answer is off-site SEO.

Why Off-Site SEO is Important

If one of your potential customers is in need of what you’re selling, say "blue widgets" for example, chances are they will visit Google and run a search for "blue widgets." If your website isn’t on that very first page of search results, then you’ve just lost a potential customer. Why? Because most searchers will visit the website that appears in the number one spot in the search results, or one of the others on the very first page only – in other words, they have a very short attention span. Fortunately, an effective off-site search engine optimization (SEO) campaign can ensure that your website is always front and center so that your potential customers can easily find you and buy your products or services.

Off-Site SEO Basics

To ensure that your website appears on that first page of search results, you need to improve your website’s off-site SEO. To do this, your website needs links from other websites. Now, you might be thinking more is better, right? Wrong. When it comes to off-site search engine optimization, quality is always more important than quantity. In fact, most websites that hold the number one spot on Google and other search engines for a given keyword ("blue widgets" for example) rarely have the most links – they hold the number one spot because they have the most high quality links.

As far as Google and the other search engines are concerned, high quality links are those that come from websites that are related to yours. It’s also important that those websites be established authority sites in their market because links from these websites carry far more weight with the search engines.

Dangers of Bad Off-Site SEO

There are many search engine optimization companies out there that offer linking services, but before you hire anyone you should remember that cheaper isn’t always better, especially in this case. Many SEO companies will try to impress you by offering to create a huge number of links to your website for a very low fee, but chances are those links are very low quality and will do little if anything to improve your website’s position in the search engines. Worse still, those cheap links may cause your website to lose its current position and it may even result in your website being "de-indexed" from the search engines altogether, which would be a disaster for your online marketing efforts. That’s why you should only hire an SEO company that uses high quality links for their off-site SEO campaigns.