Off-site optimisation is really trying to achieve two things. The first is to create brand awareness away from your website and the second is to give more authority to your brand against the targeted search engine keyword phrases.

The brand awareness is simple in that people are more likely to click on your search engine results or look for you if they are aware of your brand.

The more competitive the keyword phrases you want to rank against the more work you will need to put in to achieve a good ranking. For example, if your B&B establishment is in a small village it should be easy to rank well for “village name bed and breakfast” as you don’t have many to compete against. But, if you want to target the region or county, “Cornwall bed and breakfasts” then you are competing against a lot more establishments. In the first case you will probably achieve you objectives with on-site optimisation but for the later you will need an off-site campaign.

An off site campaign needs to get your message out on media away from your website. This can be traditional printed media, advertising, social media, links from other websites or online articles. In the case of online media you need to link to the targeted page with the anchor text of your keyword phrase. This will tell the search engines that the external article thinks your page is relevant to the keyword phrase.

A few words of caution. You should never pay for links, exchange links (where another site points at you and you point back), have a link on a page with 100′s of others (link farms), or have a link form poor performing websites.