Off-page SEO or off-site SEO are the techniques used to improve your search engine results page ranking or SERP outside of your website. If you think off-page SEO is just about link building, then you are wrong. Minus the website design, off-page SEO activities are promotional methods that are used to improve your website’s search engine rankings.
If you have a website on the internet, you would certainly like it to rank high on the search engine results page. But there are only a few websites that can rank on the first page of the search results.
So, what should you do to ensure that your website climbs the search engine rankings and lands in the top search results?
In case you want your website to rank high on the search results, you need to make sure that you have a smart SEO strategy in place. But don’t forget that you cannot have a sound SEO strategy without factoring in off-page SEO.
What is SEO?
style=”float:left; “>You need to have a complete SEO strategy in place if you want your website to rank among the top search results. According to Moz, search engine optimisation or SEO refers to methods used to increase the traffic, including qualitative as well as quantitative, to your website through unpaid or organic search engine results.
Search engines use complex algorithms for indexing and ranking purposes, and you need to work out ways that allow them to get the requisite information about your website. And, that is what SEO helps to achieve.
There are two main parts of SEO – On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. And, to have a complete SEO strategy in place, you need to work on both.
Before getting into the details of off-page SEO, let us briefly touch upon on-page SEO.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO refers to the measures that are taken directly within the website to improve its search engine rankings. Some of the important on-page SEO tips are:
- You need to optimise titles and descriptions.
- You need to have proper URL structures.
- Your website should have user-friendly navigation.
- You also need to optimise internal links.
- You need to optimise the images and format the text.
- You need to have user-friendly 404 pages.
- Your website should be mobile-friendly.
- Your website should have a fast load speed.
- You need to have top quality and fresh content.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO, unlike on-page SEO, refers to the activity undertaken outside of your website to improve your website’s search engine rankings. Off-page SEO mainly revolves around these three activities:
- Link building
- Social media marketing
- Social bookmarking
- But before getting into these, let us try to find out the importance and benefits of off-page SEO.
Why is off-page SEO important?
For long the search engines have been trying hard to find out a way of throwing up the best results for the searcher. And, to get the best results, the search engines take into account the on-site SEO factors, a few other quality aspects, and off-page SEO. And, off-page SEO activities give the search engines a fair idea of how your website is perceived by others on the web.
A high-quality and useful website would have links (references) from other websites. Also, such websites are likely to be mentioned more by others on social media. And, these websites would be bookmarked and shared more among communities.
Benefits of off-page SEO
If you have a successful off-page SEO strategy in place, it has several benefits to offer to the website owners. And, some of these are:
It improves your website’s rankings – a successful off-page SEO strategy can improve your website ranking on the search engine results page.
It increases your traffic – A successful off-page SEO strategy can also increase the number of people visiting your website. As your rankings improve, your traffic is bound to increase.
It also increases your website’s PageRank – It is an algorithm which is used by Google Search to rank web pages on its search engine results. A successful off-page strategy can increase your page rank.
It gives your website more exposure – A successful off-page SEO ensures higher ranking which means more exposure for your website because it then gets more links, visits, and social media mentions/ shares.
Let us now look at link building, social media marketing, and social bookmarking.
Link building
Link building forms the core of off-page SEO activity. It is by far the most popular and effective off-page SEO method. When you build external links to your website, you get positive votes which help you climb the search engine rankings.
The more good quality links your website gets, the more search engines learn that your website contains relevant information which boosts your search engine rankings.
As mentioned earlier, link building is at the heart of off-page SEO. Depending on how you earn the link, they are categorized into three main types – natural links, manually built links, and self-created links.
Natural links – These are links when other website owners or bloggers link to your content (could be in the form of blogs, videos, images, products, etc.) because they find it useful and relevant for their readers.
Manual link building – You get these links through deliberate link-building activities. A manual link building exercise is a process of actively trying to increase links to a website. You get these links by asking customers to link to your website or requesting influencers to share your content.
Self-created link building – These are links that are created by adding a backlink in an online directory, blog comment signature, a press release with optimised anchor text, or forum. A few self-created link building strategies meander towards black hat SEO which search engines don’t approve of; hence you should tread cautiously.
Irrespective of how you get the links, those links that pass on maximum link juice (or link equity) to your website generally work well for your SEO strategy. And, some of the things that positively contribute to the link juice passage are:
- The popularity of the site that you are linking to makes a big difference.
- How relevant the linking site’s topic is to your site also makes a difference.
- How the anchor text is used on the linking site also makes a big difference.
- Another thing that matters is the freshness of the link.
- The reliability or trustworthiness of the site that you are getting the link from also makes a difference.
- The number of other links that are present on the linking site also makes a difference.
- Another thing that makes a difference is the authority of the linking domain and page.
Social media is also a form of link building, and it is a part of the off-page SEO. What you need to understand is that almost all of the links that you get from social media sites are nofollow links, but it is not that they don’t have any value. Social media is gaining traction, and if done in the right manner, it can improve your rankings on the search engine results page.
Social bookmarking
Despite social bookmarking losing some ground of late, it is still an effective way to increase the number of visitors to your website. You can promote your content on websites like reddit.com, scoop.it, and stumbleupon.com, etc.
To get the desired results you need to work on both – off-page SEO as well as on-page SEO. Both have their relevance.
If off-page SEO activity is bothering you, you can get in touch with vStacks Software Solutions now. We will make sure that you have a smart off-page SEO strategy in place so that your website can rank high on the search results. You can also contact us for a complete SEO strategy.
