Off-site SEO is the process in which backlinks are built; this process also includes the off-site promotion of the website to increase a websites popularity.
A websites popularity is dictated by its presence across other websites on the internet. That's it in basics, the more websites that link, the more popular the website, really, its that simple on the whole. On the inside however, the quality of those websites linking is just as important If not more important.
A popular website can also be a website that has fewer links from more authoritive websites. Backlinks are a measurement of quality, the 2 most important things to remember are:
How good is the website linking to your website?
How many of these good websites link to your website?
If you think about it, a backlink is very much like a vote. The more votes somebody has the more popular they are. This is the same for websites with backlinks.
A website without backlinks, or with a small backlink volume can still rank well, however, it is likely to loose its ground very quickly as websites are given merits both on the on-site and off-site SEO.
Building backlinks is actually the wrong terminology, because building backlinks means that you are trying to influence backlinks, when search engines actually class backlinks as a naturally generated thing which is why they are used as a ranking factor.
Manual backlink development is an incredibly long and tedious process, and has become less popular over the past 2 years. Now, many good SEO agencies will offer link development via a consultancy service, helping businesses to generate tools and resources that are likely to influence a greater volume of new backlinks.
Imagine spending £5000 a month on backlink development, if your only getting 50-70 backlinks for this cost, then is it really worth it? You could generate tools and resources that attract 1000's of links, and the generated resources may end up costing less than the initial backlink development. However, this does not apply to every industry, some industries such as Holidays are harder to build tools and resources for.
Backlink development can become a tedious process as it involves e-mailing other webmasters in the hope of getting a backlink. Approaching 50 and getting a response from only 5 just goes to show you the kind of ratios you could be dealing with.
Lets put it into perspective, some websites out there on the internet have millions of backlinks, even large websites may have in excess of 10,000 backlinks. Now imagine building this at a rate of 50 contacts, with 5 responses with 3 confirmed links?
Its daunting to even think about it, but in reality this is what some people have to go against.
Assertive-Media offer a comprehensive link development service, however our approach is different. We create resources for your business, we then do lots of PR and marketing to promote your website and the tools we develop for you.
The result from the generated tools and PR includes new backlinks.
If someone e-mails you asking for you to link to their website, you'd most likely ignore it if the website was irrelevant, but would you link to a website if they had a resource that you would like to recommend to your visitors?
There are lots of ways of building backlinks, here we will go into more depth:
