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good on-site search engine optimisation techniques will provide your website with a solid base on which to build, it's the off-site factors which will really propel it higher in the rankings. Their are a few different off-site factors which come into play when assessing the popularity of your site in the search engine results pages. Today however, we shall look at 3 of the most important. These include, the quality and the quantity of inbound links to your site, the diversity of those inbound links and the popularity of your site including the 'bounce rate'.



Inbound links are links pointing to your site from another domain. In simple terms the search engines view these incoming links as a vote for your website. However, not all links are created equal and too many of the wrong type of links coming into your site can have a detrimental effect on your ranking. What's most important, when it comes to inbound links, is that they contain relevant anchor text for the keyword you are hoping to rank for. It is also paramount that the site the link originates from is relatively important in the eyes of the search engines (known as the page rank algorithm in Google) and that their is a good quantity of incoming links, compared with a competing site. Gaining these links can be a fairly difficult task unless you know what you are doing. Writing fresh and relevant content on a regular basis is one way of attracting incoming links to your site, as well as exchanging links with fellow web masters. However, using a link building expert is definitely recommended if you wish to gain a high number of relevant links into your site.

Link diversity is another off-site factor of great importance. If the search engines see that many of your links are coming from the same place or the same sort of site, they will view this in a negative manner. It is always important to diversify your link profile to include a wide range of differing domains, servers and anchor text. Again, this is where a link building expert will be of particular use.

The popularity of your site with visitors and the 'bounce rate', that is the rate of which people click on, and then immediately click off your site are also necessary factors to consider. Both of these elements can be measured and recorded with a decent analytics program such as Google analytics. A low rate of visitors can mean a poor SEO campaign, while a high bounce rate means you should almost certainly look at your on-site content or the design of your website to see if they could be improved.

Mastering these tips will give you the competitive edge needed to move your site to near the top of the search engine rankings!