As anyone with a website knows the most important component needed to be successful online is traffic. Preferably free, targeted traffic and lots of it. Why is quality traffic elusive to the majority of website owners while others seem to have a steady stream of qualified visitors visiting their websites daily?

One reason is “offpage search engine optimization”. Offpage search engine optimization is crucial to the success of any website. If you understand the facts about search engine optimization you know the major search engines rely heavily on offpage sources to rank and index website pages.

Offpage optimization is simply the process of human visitors looking at your website and feeling confident enough with your content to refer other people to your site. Although the search engines crawl websites for information, there is no human element involved in the process. Human referrals come in the form of offpage links directed to your website.

If you have ever worked any type of sales or small businesses marketing you understand how valuable a good referral can be. A referral from someone who is familiar with your products or services can open a lot of doors that otherwise could take months or years to open on your own. The same is true in the online world.

Online referrals come from a variety of sources including directories, websites, blogs, articles and forums to name a few. Work these prospective referrals the same as you would in the offline world. The better known and respected the source is, the better your chances are of capitalizing on the referral.

For example, the DMOZ directory is considered to be the ultimate and most comprehensive directory on the internet. So popular that it can take over one year to get reviewed and listed in the directory. A referral from DMOZ is going to open doors and help with your search engine rankings. There are a lot of other good directories on the internet that you can become listed in much faster. They might not have near the referral power that DMOZ does, however it’s still a referral.

The key thing to remember is you must work your online referrals the same as you would in the offline marketplace. Offline you would attend local networking functions, business meetings, fundraisers, civic meetings, seminars and social functions to network and get referrals to promote your business.

You must do the same for your online business. For your online business you will become listed in directories, participate in forum discussions, comment on blog postings, publish a blog, write original articles and distribute them through article distributors. As website and blog publishers “get to know you” through your comments and articles they will begin to refer others to your website via links from their websites or blogs back to your website.

This is the human referral that search engines look for when indexing and ranking websites. The more quality referrals “links” a website has the better the ranking in the search engines. As sophisticated as the internet has become, it still comes down to basic networking, getting referrals and working the referrals to increase the awareness of the products or services you offer.

Greg Greenamyer is an entrepreneur with 30 years of small business
experience including 9 years of internet marketing. Greg founded DomainNamePotential.com , an informational website focusing on the importance of domain names and SEO friendly website development. Greg also buys, sells and develops domain names.