Improving external SEO factors

[Duncan]

Hello,

I have launched many sites recently and all are doing very successful. However, I wish to improve on the success. My sites are "SEO'd out" if you will - I am just looking for backlinking tips I suppose.

For instance, I have a checklist of which I run through with each site.

Like..

1) Submit to major search engines
2) Add to webmaster tools in google (even though does not helping rankings)
3) Add to analytics in google (even though it does not help rankings)

Any other tips would be appreciated. I am not looking for ways to improve the CODE/HTML of the sites, but rather the external SEO factors not relating to the changing of the code.

If you do not feel comfortable sharing these tips publicly feel free to send a PM!

Cheers,
Andy

[godinme]

Hi Andy,

Congratulations on your success so far.

When you mention that your website has been SEO'ed I assume you mean that the on-page optimization has been taken care of. This would include

1. Title Tags (I believe this is the most significant tag)
2. Meta Description. (while this should be fairly keyword rich, it should be appealing to people reading your listing. It certainly impacts the CTR)
3. Meta Keywords (not to much help, but it does not hurt)
4.Image Optimization
5. Sitemaps in ROR,XML and Php/HTML whatever you choose.

Its good to know that you have your analytics and webmaster accounts setup. Once you have reached so far, you could need to start with the Off-Page optimization.

This would include and not limited to:
1. Backlinks for Related themed websites
2. Links from Blogs and Forums. (be really careful not to spam these forums/blogs) If done correctly, the results are tremendous.
3. Write a few articles and submit them to sites such as Ezinearticles and article city.
4. Press Releases and other Social Bookmarks.

Depending upon your niche and competition this should be enough to see an increase in rankings. I would suggest download Webceo or a similar software to track the ranking positions in the SERPS.

Goodluck!
Gaurav

[dncsacnt]

I agree with godinme especially with the backlinks and forum posting. I just want to add, that quality is better than quantity. Its much better to only have a few quality backlinks than have a thousand low quality ones. Since low quality backlinks is almost useless, in my opinion.

[HarveyJ]

Ensure that your sites have a social bookmarking widget on them, like AddThis, especially if they're content driven sites.
If people are visiting the sites, when they bookmark it for you, it's one more authoritative link you're getting. If other people Hit it again, the +1-ing will help increase the ranking that that particular link gets on the social bookmarking sites as well... although they do tend to value recency over relevancy.

Of course, this does rely on having some kind of content that people are going to want to bookmark... Which usually means something funny or controversial.

[Aleksandar]

Just try to get as much links from good ranking similar sites to yours. This is the best method to drive some quality traffic and of course increase your page rank.

[bakis85]

You could spy your competitors using some of the free backlink checking tools out there like site explorer for example...


Find where do your competitors get backlinks from and pick the most suitable and quality backlinks from these. Then go to these websites and try to get a backlink for you as well....