Toronto SEO Firm

On-Page Versus Off-Page SEO. In my book, “The Dao of SEO”, I wrote the following: “Basically link popularity (off-page SEO) and standard website optimization (on-page SEO) go hand in hand. Link popularity is like fuel for your car. Optimization is like having your car pointed in the right direction. Without fuel the car won’t go anywhere. Without being pointed in the right direction, even with a full tank, the car won’t end up where you want it to go.” When you start out with a website, even when the designer or the SEO software has given you some keyword tags, the destination usually remains somewhat undefined and the tank is almost always running on empty.   The focus on this website is on-page optimization, the roadmap for your rankings.  But I’ll also talk a bit about how you can fuel-up for the journey.

In the nineties, everything was about on-page optimization but people were becoming aware that linking was increasingly important. If other people linked to you, it implied that they trusted you as a destination. People realized that Google was factoring that into the ranking algorithm. Eventually it would become almost half the ranking battle. A huge reciprocal linking industry was created to feed that perceived need. People were still more worried about on-page factors but at the same time they were showing up with thousands and thousands of reciprocal links. You link to me and I link to you. Google quickly realized that this was undermining the ranking algorithm.  Google sunk the reciprocal linking industry in late 2004.

Anticipating the demise, in April 2004, I created the Internet’s first programmed one-way links program. For several years previous, clients had asked me to help them with linking. I simply said, “I don’t do that.” Then one day, I experienced maybe the only “eureka” moment of my life. I had about 120 SEO clients. It occurred to me that if I divided them into three pods (“I must have just watched “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”), I could have the first pod linking to the second pod and the second pod linking to the third pod and the third pod linking to the first pod. Eureka, one-way links. But real one-way links involving independent websites, not  link farm.  I launched my links program and today, 12 years later, having weathered all the Google storms, the program is the engine of my business. You can visit the site here.  Is linking still important in 2016?  Maybe more than ever.  I just came across this interesting quote at WebmasterWorld:  “Trustrank (i.e. links) is the admittance that algorithms can’t make reliable choices about quality in a commercial real world scenario“