Having your website listed on the front page of Google, or other top search engines, for your keyword can mean up to 60% of your traffic. However, getting up into the top three positions can mean 80% of your traffic. Search engine optimization for your actual webpages is very important, but so is the off page optimization practices you are using. What, you’re not doing off page optimization?

For many people, off page optimization is a mystery. It’s hard enough to try and get your own pages optimized for Google, rather than trying to figure out all the off page stuff too. But, it doesn’t have to be that difficult. In fact, if you just do a few things, that you are probably doing anyway, you can have pretty good off page optimization.

1. Link Popularity – A great number of people come to your site from the search engines, but another great number from links to your site from other websites. By using a proper “anchor text” for your link on other people’s websites, the search engine can take that into their algorithms when ranking your domain. The trick for link popularity is that they should be one way links. The best way to do have one way links is through article marketing. Writing an article and using an anchor text in your signature file for your link will help with link popularity.

2. Blog For Google Ranking – Google loves bloggers. If you were to type in a keyword for just about anything, you will probably get a blog in the first few listings. Blogs are highly configurable content management systems that are continuously updated with new content, videos, links, and other content Google’s spiders love to crawl over. If your blog is on another domain, you can also link to your main site through your content for more link popularity.

3. Forum Participation – Each and every time you answer a question on a forum post, or start your own thread, you are posting your link in your signature. These individual threads are all indexed by the search engines and can show up for relevant keywords. This gives you both indirect, and direct optimization.

Start practicing off page optimization for higher Google rankings and you’ll see a drastic increase in your ranking numbers.