What does "off the page" mean?

Search engines take many factors into account when deciding where to rank your site. Although the content of your site is very important, there are several other factors, which are not contained in the code of your own site, yet which count. These are the "off the page" criteria. A complete search engine optimisation program should take all of these into account.

What are the "off the page" criteria?

• Number of links - The more links that point to your site, the more "popular" your site looks to the search engine
  
• Relevance of links - If your site is about your widget manufacturing business, a link from the site of another widget manufacturer will be given more weight than a link from the site of a dog-grooming parlour
  
• Clickthrough rates - Some search engines keep a record of how many people click on a particular link. As the number of clicks rises, so does your standing in the rankings
  
• Directory listings - Directories like Yahoo! or LookSmart use human editors to manually review every site before including them in their index. Any site listed in one must therefore reach a certain standard, and are usually given extra weight by the automatic search engines to reflect this quality
  
• Paid inclusion - Many of the major search engines offer additional programs allowing you to buy your inclusion in their database. This is often the quickest route to getting a listing, and can provide a boost to ranking also

There is a lot of information about this topic out on the Internet. It is of variable quality and freshness; due to the ongoing battle between the search engines and those who try to manipulate them, much of it is out of date almost as soon as it is published. At theITbridge, we keep abreast of the current state of play, what works, and what doesn't, and are ideally placed to advise you

To get the other half of the picture read about our "On the page" optimisation project. Alternatively, return to the options page