To understand how to grow a website’s popularity, you need to know how search engines find a website.  They will visit a website already in their index, then from that site; they’ll follow all the links on that site, to visit.  Then they’ll visit that website and visit all of the links on that page and so on.  This is called “crawling”.

 

Let’s say you have a new website.  It is not indexed by any of the search engines.  They don’t know you exist.  How would the search engines find out about this site?  They need to find your site by following links on websites that are already in their index.

 

So, what is offpage optimization anyway? Offpage optimization basically consists of all of the offpage ranking factors like:

·         Which websites link to you

·         The number of websites linking to you

·         The Google page rank of the website linking to you

·         The page title of the website linking to you

·         The anchor text used in the link linking to you

·         The number and type of links linking to the website that’s linking to you.

·         The number of outbound links on the website that is linking to you

·         The total number of links on the website that is linking to you

·         Whether or not Google deems the websites linking to you as an authority website.

 

To test whether a linking strategy works, the largest 100 credit unions were analyzed.  First, the Google PageRank of the home page of each credit union was determined.  Then the number of unique links to each credit union, along with their page rank, was analyzed.  The following table summarizes the results:

 

 

The data shows the more links to a website, the higher the PageRank.  Credit unions with a PageRank of 5 or 6 had, on average, 166 unique links to their site.  In addition, more of those links had a PageRank of 5 or greater.  Thus, the higher the quality of a link, the better PageRank the credit union will achieve.

 

How do you get other sites to link to you?

 

Directories

Make sure the credit union is listed in web directories (such as DMOZ , Google Local Business Center, etc.), and the various credit union directories that exist (CreditUnionsDirectory, credituniondb, Credit Union Access, etc.).  In addition, there are business and financial directories (The Community Banker, local lender info, etc.) that credit unions may be listed.  You are looking for directories with a high PageRank (indication Google sees some value in the directory), well maintained, and have high traffic.  Directories to avoid include, link farms that pose as directories, directories that require reciprocal links, and crappy ones with crappy sites listed.

 

Media Releases

Submit media releases on topics relevant to the credit union.  Obviously, submit to the various credit union publications and news feeds.  However, also include sites such as, PRWeb, PRLeap, and PRNewsWire.  If published on these sites can result in a link with a PageRank of 6.

 

Local & Business Links

Join the Better Business Bureau and the local Chamber of Commerce.  Submit your site to relevant city and state governmental resources.  List your site at the local library’s web site.  See if business partners might list your site.  If you use a Select Employee Group (SEG) strategy, try to get the credit union’s website link on the SEG’s site.

 

Blogs and Forums

Posting in forums is an excellent way to spread your knowledge and advertise your products and services.  A lot of forums allow signatures where you can link your site and refer people to it, which will increase your Google PageRank.  Posting on credit union blogs will increase your PageRank.  Post new ideas and thoughts every day, offer advice and answer questions and obviously, promote the credit union.  Please note, many blogs use the “nofollow” attribute.  Thus, search engines will not index comments.  That Credit Union Blog, PageRank of 3, and CU Hype, PageRank of 5 do not have the “nofollow” attribute.

 

Articles

Article writing is one of the best ways to increase your Google PageRank.  You have the ability to spread your knowledge, use keyword optimization, submit articles to numerous article directories, and spread your website link.  Here are three of the more popular article directories:  GoArticles (PR 6), EzineArticles (PR 6), and iSnare (PR 5).

 

Competitive Analysis

Looking at the backlinks of your competitors, or those related to credit unions, is another excellent way to find potential links.  You can determine the backlinks for any website.  Go to Yahoo! And enter this search command:  link:http://www.siteyouaresearching.com  You can do the same on Google, but they have cut down on the number of backlinks they will show you.

 

What Not To Do

There are many “black hat” ways to increase your search engine ranking.  They may work for awhile, but they are not worth the risk.  Sooner or later, Goggle will catch up to these techniques and remove your website from it’s index.

·         Hidden text.  Hidden text is text that users can’t see when they visit your webpage (i.e. type color is white).  Some sites will do this to add keywords throughout their webpage without it interferring with what the visitors actually see.  However, the search engines can see it.

·         Alt image tag spamming.  This is another way people try to cram keywords into their website.  Search engines can see the words, but visitors won’t notice any difference.

·         Meta tag stuffing.  This is when people put thousands of the same exact keyword into their keyword meta tag.  This is ridiculous, since Goggle doesn’t use this meta tag when ranking websites. 

·         Title tag stuffing.  Don’t stuff the title tag with your keywords.  You only need your keyword one time in the title tag.  Any more will dilute the effect and you may get banned.

 

Link building is not a one-time event.  Continually search out and find new sources of links to your website.  As you add more and more links over time, your site’s position in search engines will continue to improve.

To obtain a free credit union SEO assessment, click here.