The major search engines and Google in particular considers inbound links as a significant factor in their organic search algorithm. Building inbound links, links from other people’s websites pointing into your website, would be part of your off-site optimisation strategy. Here are some common off-site techniques to maximise your SEO traffic:

• Link popularity: To enhance the ranking of your e-commerce website, ensure that it is well linked from other websites. Links are like votes, the more you get the better you will rank but its not just an issue of quantity, quality carries a much greater weight and one good quality link can improve your rankings significantly above hundreds of bad quality links. Whenever possible, solicit links from different websites. In fact, a website with links belonging to a wide variety of different IP addresses is a good example of an effective ecommerce SEO tactic.

• Relevant links: Search engines, especially Google, ranks websites that are linked from relevant websites higher than the ones which are just randomly linked to from other websites. The greater the number of relevant sites linking to your ecommerce site the higher your search engine rankings will be.

• Appropriate anchor text: SEO traffic can be enhanced by ensuring that the anchor text of your website’s external link has the main keywords. For instance, if you want to improve your rank for the keyword ‘burglar alarms,’ ensure that the link that directs the SEO traffic to your website uses the keyword ‘burglar alarms’. Vary your anchor text amongst your main key phrases and so not include any other irrelevant content in the anchor text link.

• PageRank (PR): Getting links to your website from high PageRank sites enhances the credibility and importance of your website and pushes your rankings up. This is because PageRank is passed from one page to another, so a page with 10 links on it will pass one tenth of the link juice to the pages it links to. If you have a link from a site with a high PageRank (PR6 or 7) and you are one of very few links on that page you will receive a lot of juice. This is a good link, actually a great link! If you have a link on a page that is PR1 or PR2 and your site is one of 100 listed then you will receive nothing of value from that. The higher the PageRank of a page the more authority it is considered to have, the more valuable the link and the harder it is to get a link from it. Note that PageRank is not passed through a nofollow link.

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