Sometimes we get lost in our quest for that illusive number one spot on our favorite search engine. SEO or search engine optimization has many sections which are all important. Including hotmail, special wording placement, titles, tags and content for our onpage design to name a few. But none are as important to our offpage agenda. In my opinion offpage optimization holds ten times more weight or has much more relevance when considering how search engines rank your site. For the most part it all revolves around your inbound links. Let's look at a few key factors.



Linking your way up the Google ranks

- You want quality websites linking into you

- You want multitudes linking in

- You want websites with the same niche as yours

- You want the links from them to contain your keywords

The list is endless, but you're starting to get the picture. Let's start off with saying we want on subject, important, highly ranked websites linking into us. We also want the same websites linking into them to be of the best quality sites. If possible, they also need to be on target with our subject niche. The links into sites linking to ours is important, it gives them credibility, and in turn gives us credibility. Put simply would you hire a company with 3 employees or 300? I want them all but that is beside the point. For this discussion we want to thing big.

We want inbound links to fuel our rise to the top of the search engines. Easier said than done right? We can take the long route and do everything manually or we can get it simplified. I like gathering links from my competition. No it's not immoral, it's not wrong, it can be done and I'm positively not the first. I'm serious, if we had the exact same inbound links and I had my competitors' inbound link who would rank higher in the search engines? Ok, now do you want to know how to do that? Analyze your competing WebPages. Maximizing onpage we would view their source. Maximizing offpage a trick I use is Link:www-yourcompetitor'sdomain-com, which works on Google. That will show you how many inbound links they have. Also, coupled with the incredible programming behind SEO elite, you could very well contact each and every one of those links and request an exchange.

So, to be serious about this, if your webpage is structured like your competition, and you gather more links, bingo, you're on top for a change. The fact is, Google ranks pages on their inbound links heavily and the onpage substance is just icing on the cake.

I'm sure you noticed that I said good quality inbound links to the websites linking to us. That is also very important. You can get a little added value from the search engines if the quality links go a few levels deep, and who's to say if you don't go after getting those links themselves versus just settling for the website they are linking to? Just remember when I say quality link, I mean the link it comes from, which is directed to your webpage contains your webpage theme in their title, subtitles, alt tags, etc. We are after value, so make sure our inbound links contain on subject text in sync with our webpage theme as well.

There are many avenues in which to follow your search engine dominance, and these are just the tip of the iceberg. Just the few key elements listed above, can help out a lot if applied correctly. Who knows maybe you're the next SEO mastermind. Maybe you are the one who has a different spin on it. Face it, search engine optimization is in constant change and we live in a competitive world. Let your creativity out and apply it in this avenue for a short while. Many of us have little to lose except maybe the monthly costs of paid advertizing. Set your goal of number one ranking today, apply yourself, and never have to worry about that again.

On the other end of the spectrum, your links can hurt your rankings. A friend of mine suddenly dropped down the rankings had given me a call. We narrowed it down to a few of his links. It wasn't that he was getting beat on the search engine ladder by better ranking WebPages, he had a lot of links that were not linking back to his webpage. That can hurt. He was linking out, and losing valuable rank because he wasn't getting any return. Another way people lose rankings is they are linked to a site that has been blocked or banned. We definitely do not want to do that. The answer is constant monitoring of links on our webpages. I run a program to check status on a regular basis. It gives me piece of mind, and can work for you also. Another way to monitor your linking status is to download a website ranking toolbar on your browser and check out each page manually, however I value my time and found it much easier to run the program.

There you have it, offpage optimization, more specifically, inbound links can shoot your webpage right to the top of search engines. With a well planned course of action and a few powerful computer analyzing programs you can start your quest for SEO dominance. Out of every webpage out there all going for top spot we could all use a few key pointers.

Here's to your SEO journey