This is the final part of my SEO for Blogs series and  I am going to concentrate on the very important subject of Off Site Optimization. Off site optimization is all about building backlinks to your website and if you miss this part out you can probably wave goodbye to getting any traffic from the search engines!

Before we start I am assuming that you have already read part one, part two, part three and part four of my Wordpress SEO series and you have chosen keywords for your home page, have a big list of keywords to use in your future blog posts and you have optimized your home page.

A backlink is simply a link from a website pointing to your website. Search engines see backlinks a bit like votes for a website – the more backlinks that you have the more important your website is deemed by the search engines. It’s not just the quantity of backlinks that counts though – it is also the quality. A backlink from an important website is better than a backlink from a brand new website. A backlink from a page that has just a few other links on it is better than a backlink from a page that has 50 other links on it.

In an ideal world, backlinks would come naturally. People would link to your website because the content on your site is useful to others. This happens a lot, but it can be difficult to get natural links to a new website that nobody knows about.

For this reason you need to spend a good proportion of your marketing efforts acquiring backlinks. There are lots of ways to do this and I discuss this in more detail in my how to improve your Google page rank post. In summary here are some of the things that you can do to get a backlink:

• Write a short article of 400-500 words and submit it to article directories. Include an author resource box containing a link to your website.
• Submit your website to online directories.
• Leave a comment on other peoples’ blog posts and include a link to your website.
• Post in forums related to your website and put a link to your website in the signature.
• Write a Press release and distribute it to online press release directories.
• Create a free report, include your link in the report and allow people to give it away for free.
• Create online profiles on websites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace and put a link to your website in your profile

These are just some ways to get a backlink to your website.

Usually when you submit an article, leave a comment on a blog or submit your site to a directory you will get a choice of the words to use in the anchor text of the link to your link. The anchor text is the clickable link that is usually underlined and in blue font. It is important to use your keywords in the anchor text wherever you can and this will help you to rank more highly in the search engines.

You will do better in the search engines if you keep your link building as natural as possible. You should try to:

• Build your links slowly and steadily – don’t try to get thousands of links in the space of a few weeks.
• Vary your anchor text – as well as using your keywords in the anchor text you should use variations of your keywords.
• Avoid purchasing links or getting links from sites that are not listed in the search engines – although this won’t have a negative impact on your search engine ranking, it is unlikely to help. Google frowns upon bought links.

Finally, you shouldn’t  just build links to your home page, you should spend some of your link building efforts building links to individual blog posts or pages. One of the quickest and easiest ways  to do this is by using social bookmarking services to bookmark your blog posts. You can also learn about other deep link building techniques here.

I hope you found my five part SEO for Blogs series useful. If you have a comment or a question please feel free to post it below!