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In my last post, I shared a few tips to better optimize your website via On-Page SEO. Although Off-Page factors are more important than On-Page, they are out of the SEO expert’s control.  One of the most important factors is incoming links or backlinks. Backlinks are links from other websites into the page or website and they are very important to the search engines. Meanwhile, links from famous sites like CNN, BBC, Yahoo, something.edu or somthing.gov are much more effective than ordinary sites.

Improving Off-Page Optimization

Here is a list of  Off-Page tips to improve your site’s search engine results:

Using Social Media

When putting a website’s contents, news or new information into the social media, it is very helpful to have backlinks. In order to put a website’s contents in the social media, put the links into those contents and avoid rewriting the same content. Here are the most important Social Media: Twitter.com, Facebook.com, LinkedIn.com, Digg.com, Buzz.google.com, MySpace.com, Meme.yahoo.com, Flickr.com (for photos), and SlideShare.com (for presentations). For uploading movies, it is highly recommended to use YouTube.com, because Search Engines like this site for indexing movie information.

Using Directories

There are several professional web directories which introduce information in specific areas; for example, for improving SERP for a Car Dealer website there some web directories like auto.yahoo.com, cars.com, and autos.msn.com. Some of them are free and others have a fee.

Using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Links

According to Wikipedia, RSS “is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.”

Many users are used to subscribing to RSS to receive all new information from websites instead of browsing among them. RSS increases the number of backlinks into the site; moreover, search engines like RSS and index it and its information.

Having blogs

Blogs are one of the most effective ways to increase the website traffics.  They can be about many things, including training and news. The most important thing for being in the first page of SERP is information and blogs bring information into the websites.

Avoiding SEO Traps

There are some traps waiting for SEO experts and web developers that degrade their websites and they should be careful of them. Here are some SEO traps:

Flash

One of the most important traps is using Flash in page content. Search engines usually do not index flash information. Although SEO expert can convert it with some code optimizing into being search engine friendly, it is recommended not to use Flash.

Images information

In order to use images in page content, always put a description of the images in the “alt attribute.” Search Engines index information in all “alt attributes.”

Extremely large and slow page

Search Engines ignore large and slow pages and it is better to divide a large page into several small but fast-loading pages.

SEO Tools and Maintenance Techniques

There are several tools and sites which SEO experts and webmasters use to monitor their websites. It is very important to check competitors’ websites to evaluate them and try to be better than them. Web developers can learn a lot from studying competitors’ websites and they should monitor them and be ready to maintain theirs in a better way. Some of the useful web sites in this regard are: webtrends.com, analog.cx and webalizer.com. Through those sites, webmasters can monitor and control the number of visitors, number of hits, number of page views, referrers and search engine hits.