A Quick Off-Page SEO Guide
Off-page optimization refers to all the measures that can be taken outside the website to improve its ranking on search engine result pages. Unlike on-page SEO, it does not deal with the optimization of your site or content itself. So, off-page optimization factors are not in the direct control of the website owner.
Off-page optimization is as important as On-Page optimization. Without applying off-page factors, your website site may not rank as higher as it could be. Off-page SEO factors such as link building, social media, videos, blogging, etc., are very important for the SEO of your website.
It helps you get more clicks, more visits, and more exposure to social media. It is a chain of events that occurs one after another. So, it is a long-term process, which is mainly focused on acquiring backlinks to your webpages from social media, authority sites, and social bookmarking.
Types of links for off-page SEO:
Building links is an important part of off-page SEO. You must be aware of the type of links and the factors that influence the quality of a link to your site before you start building backlinks. There are three types of links, which are as follows:
- Natural Links: This type of links come to your site naturally. You don’t have to put effort or make strategies to earn such links. For example, a blogger has written a blog about technologies, and he has mentioned your website link in his blog.
- Built Links: These links are generated through outreach. You have to earn such links by reaching out to webmasters, publishers, or journalists or by promoting the content with an ad campaign.
- Created Links: These links are generated for your website from self-submissions on directories, forums, or press releases.
Off-Page Optimization Techniques:
- Creating Shareable Content: Quality content is always the king in SEO. Creating meaningful, relevant content that can be shared is a smart way of generating natural links to your website. So, keep researching and updating your content.
- Influencer Outreach: If you think your content is valuable and is worth sharing, don’t hesitate to reach out to influencers in your industry. If they like your content, you can get links from them. However, make sure the links come from relevant websites.
- Guest Author: You can post your content as a guest post on other blogs that are open for a guest post from various authors. You are required to write quality content that relates to their blog. If your content does not add value to their blog, they may not allow posting in their blogs.
- Social Media Engagement: It is also an important off-page SEO technique that allows you to make your website or business popular by interacting with people on multiple social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. It will help you get more backlinks.
- Social Bookmarking Sites: These sites offer you a platform to promote your website. You can upload your webpage or blog post on these sites with a link to your site. Thus, you can gain high traffic to your site.
- Forum Submission: You can participate in forums that relate to your website and business and make connections with these communities. It allows you to reply to threads, answer people’s questions, and give suggestions. Use “Do-Follow” forums for better results.
- Blog Directory Submission: It allows you to submit your pages in directories to build backlinks. You are required to choose a popular directory and then select a proper category.
- Article Submission: You can also submit your articles in a high PR article submission directory. Your content should be unique and of high quality. Select a relevant category and give a good title to your content.
- Question and Answer: You can also get traffic to your site from question and answer websites. Join popular question and answer sites and answer the questions that are related to your business, blog, or website and answer these questions correctly. Include a link to your site in the answers which will bring you more visibility.
- Video Submission: Find popular video submission sites. Create impressive videos with proper title, description, tags, and reference links and submit them to these sites. It is a smart way to get backlinks as most of the video sites have high PR.
- Image Submission: There are many image submission sites where you can share your photos. Optimize your images with the relevant URL, title tag, description, and alt tag before submitting them.
- Infographics Submission: You can create infographics, which is a visual representation of information or data such as charts, graphs, etc. Users like infographics. Find some popular infographics submission websites and submit infographics with reference links to your webpage or blog.
- Document Sharing: There are also various document sharing sites that allow you to submit documents either in pdf or ppt formats. Create attractive, relevant documents and submit them in those sites that relate to your business, work, etc.
- Web2.0 Submission: It is also an off-page SEO technique that allows you to create subdomains on a high domain authority website. For example, blogger, WordPress, medium, etc.
- Google My Business: It is a free Google product that can be optimized for best local SEO ranking.
Link building mistakes to avoid while building backlinks:
Common Link building mistakes:
1- Link to sites with bad reputation:
Never ever link to a site that had bad reputation i.e., spam site, duplicate content site (auto-blogging, illegal sites, porn sites)
2- Buying/Selling Links:
Don’t try to buy links from other sites for getting backlinks. Sometimes, you may get banned from Search Engines for doing so. SEs only love natural links. Specially, Google made it very clear that selling and buying links are considered spam and should be avoided.
3- Getting Nofollow Links:
Nofollow links are in no way useful for your website to rank in search engines like Google. However, if you want to rank top in Bing, then you can continue to build no-follow links. Else if you are targeting only for Google, its mere a waste of time.
Despite, spend a little more time getting at least few dofollow (quality) incoming links. Though, Google made it clear that they ignore the nofollow tag most of the time but again if you are working on building links, work on getting dofollow links. There are dofollow forums that you can easily target.
4- Backlink from only high PR domains (Low PR):
Yes, it’s a good idea to get backlinks from high PR sites, but keeping a mix of high PR and low PR yields a better results. If you build up too many high PR links and no PR links, it might not look authentic.
Though there is no straight away mention from Google about this and it can be considered as SEO myth, though it’s a good idea to go for both, High PR and low PR.
5- Getting Backlinks from Irrelevant Niche sites:
An example of a quality backlink is a dofollow link from a high PR site within your niche (same topic). So try to get incoming links from same niche instead of irrelevant sites which adds very less weightage to your PR.
6- Links without your Targeted keywords in Anchor text:
The anchor text plays a major role. If your targeted keyword was used as anchor text instead of your name or your site name, then it will help you rank well for that keyword.
Note: Don’t use words such as “click here,” “check this” etc…
7- Tons of link building in short span:
Don’t try to build lot of links at a time as your site may seem a link farm in the eyes of the Search Engines. This may even make the SEs to remove your site from indexing i.e.., Ban your website from being indexed. So never try to do link building in a hurry. Remember “Rome was not built-in a day”. Slow and steady wins the race.
What is Forum Posting?
Forum posting refers to generating quality inbound links by participating in online discussion forums. It allows you to post new posts and reply to old ones to drive traffic to your site.
There are a number of forum websites which offer a platform for online discussion, i.e. message board, discussion groups, discussion forums and bulletin boards are some of the popular types of forum websites. You need to sign up on these websites only then you can submit topics for discussion.
Forum Posting Instructions:
- Choose relevant forums: You should post on related forums, i.e. if your post is about computer technology then you should prefer computer technology related forums.
- Choose proper title: Your title should clearly reflect the content of your post. An unrelated title may take your reader away from your site.
- Incorporate main keywords: Insert your main keywords in the title and body of the post. It helps your post appear in the search results for a query with the same keywords.
- Forum guidelines: Every forum has its own registration process and guidelines which you should follow. It helps you gain respect and attract serious and focused readers.
- Place your link: You can add your link in your signature at the end of a post. It will help generate backlinks to your site.
- Don’t use copied content: Don’t share or post someone else’s content on the forum. The forum does not allow the copied content and may take strict action against you.
- Avoid Direct Marketing: Forums does not allow direct marketing. You are expected to provide relevant information to the visitors and provide quick solution to their problems.
What is Article Submission?
Article submission is an off-page optimization activity. It refers to attracting traffic by submitting SEO optimized articles to popular article submission directories. It is a long term SEO activity which helps increase backlinks and boost the page rank of your website or blog.
In this off-page SEO technique, you are required to write articles and submit them on third-party websites regularly. You need to make sure that articles should be submitted in the relevant categories of popular article submission websites. You are also required to produce quality articles only then you can reap the maximum benefits of this activity.
You can consider the following points to produce quality articles;
- The article should be unique and informative.
- Incorporate main keywords in the article but not to the extent of keyword stuffing.
- The article should have optimum length; between 500 and 700 words.
- The title should be unique and must have the main keyword so that the web crawler can easily identify and index it.
- Write short paragraphs and use subheadings and bullets to make your article more presentable.
Article Submission Benefits:
- It is a simple yet effective way of building backlinks.
- It helps generate long term backlinks from popular websites.
- It boosts the marketing results and popularity of your product or brand on the World Wide Web.
- It helps you establish yourself as an expert in the industry.
- It allows you to provide valuable information to customers that helps build the trust of your potential customers.
- Your articles can be viewed by thousands of readers who visit article directories every year.
- It allows you to get continuous traffic to your site.
What is Blog Submission?
Blogging is an important off-page optimization activity in which you submit blogs in blog submission sites, blog search engines, etc. It enables you offer fresh content to your users on a regular basis so that users keep visiting your site. Today, it has become an important SEO activity for the website owners who want to convert their visitors into actual customers. It not only helps you gain backlinks, earn profit, but also to build a good rapport with potential customers. Blogs are also popular as weblogs.
Blogging is a continuous process. You need to write and post the blogs at regular intervals. Your blogs should offer unique and useful information so that they could attract users as well as the search engines.
Benefits of Blogging
Improves SEO: You can offer your users fresh and meaningful content by blogging consistently. The search engines also love to index fresh content where you can incorporate your keywords to get more exposure on search engine result pages.
Improves relationship: It helps you connect with your readers by asking relevant questions, feedback or comments at the end of the blog. You can also share your product and business updates with your clients and potential customers to maintain relationship.
Free marketing: If your blogs are useful the readers will share it with others. They can share your link, tweet it or email the information to others. Thus, indirectly they are doing the free marketing for you.
Helps Build authority: It gives you the opportunity to share industry related news and information which helps you establish authority in your niche.
More Inbound links: Blogging is one of the smartest ways to generate authoritative links to your website. Your meaningful blogs are resources for other writers who can mention your website in their articles which will generate inbound links.
What is Directory Submission?
Directory submission is an off-page optimization activity. It involves the submission of your site to a specific category of a web directory, e.g. if you have a tutorial website then you are supposed to submit your site in the education category of a web directory. Some directories are free and some charges a fee to list your site in the relevant categories.
Every directory has its own guidelines that you need to follow to submit your site. Some basic guidelines that most of the directories follow to approve a site into their database are; Title, Description, Keywords, Url, Category, Email, and Site Content.
There are plenty of benefits of having your site listed in popular directories. Some of the benefits are listed below;
- Fast indexing: The search engines can easily find your site for crawling and indexing.
- Higher link popularity: You get two additional links; a contextual category link and a unique directory listing link.
- Higher page rank: Quality directories are used in Google Algorithm to calculate Google PageRank.
- Social Media Sharing: Most of the popular directories have social media sharing buttons. It allows users to share your link with other users.
- More traffic: The heavy traffic of popular directories can be diverted to your site.
- Brand awareness: Your brand gets more exposure that helps increase brand awareness.
Types of Directory Submission:
- Paid or Featured Web Listing: In this type, the directory owner charges for submission and approves your link after sometime or within 24 hours. Some websites offer yearly or lifetime packages for submission.
- Free Web Listing: In this, you don’t have to pay for submitting in a directory. But, there is no guarantee that the administrator will approve your site. Also, it takes time for getting websites approved.
- Reciprocal Regular Web Listing: In this, you have to submit a reciprocal link to your site when you submit your website.
Method of Directory Submission:
- The first step is to choose the best directory submission sites.
- Out of the list choose one site that you think relates to your business, site.
- Then select the most appropriate category for your post that relates to your post.
- Click on the selected category.
- Select the relevant sub-category and click the submit link to submit your content or click on add article in the section.
- Provide the required details like URL, title, description and you are done with the submission.
At Salam Experts, we have a team of off-page SEO professionals who can build powerful backlinking that can help the content to increase visibility. We don’t believe in spamming and toxic link building techniques. We know the strategy of quality link building.
What is Social Bookmarking?
Social bookmarking in SEO refers to storing your links on social bookmarking sites. Doing this enables your website to create quality backlinks because most social bookmarking sites give a separate and unique URL for the link.
Bookmarking your links on social bookmarking sites stores the links as tagged pages that allow them access from any computer or browser.
Social Bookmarking important for SEO?
- increase website traffic
- Free online promotion
- Increases google page rank
- Increases page authority
- Increases Domain authority
- Faster indexing
- Portability
What is Press Release Submission?
Press Release Submissions are blogs and articles that detail new events, products, etc about the website and posting them on PR Websites. By posting updates on new events, products on these PR websites, Online users become aware of the events happening on your websites.
Advantage of using Press submission sites:
- Creates dependable Backlinks
- Increases sales for the websites
- Increases traffic on the websites
- Popularity increases for the website
What is a Guest Post?
A blog post or an article published on a website by someone else rather than the website owner is called a guest post. The process to submit a guest post is called guest posting
- Before doing a guest post, find the niche of your website or in which niche you want to do guest posting.
- After deciding the niche, find the free guest posting sites list online. You can find guest posting sites by searching on google, yahoo, or bing by keywords. The keywords like free guest posting sites list, free guest blogging sites, etc.
What is Blog Commenting?
We all are aware of what commenting is and what it does. Blog commenting is no different. Comments essentially establish a relationship between bloggers and blog readers. So it goes like this:
1. Read a blog.
2. Gain value through the mentioned content.
3. Leave a valuable comment appreciating the blog/blogger or even better, stating your learning or how the blog added value to your life and parts you want to add in the same context.
Blog Commenting Effective:
- Visibility
- Credibility
- Business Relationships
- Traffic
- Comment Backlinks
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