Welcome to a new article on SEO techniques. In previous articles What is SEO and Importance of SEO in Digital Marketing, we talked about building the knowledge base for SEO, the importance of it and how we can benefit from it by following right SEO strategies.

In the next article On-Page SEO Techniques for Better ranking, we talked about some of the important On-Page SEO strategies that will help you improve the ranking of your website.

So, our next step is to understand Off-Page SEO techniques and the importance of it.

So, what is Off-Page SEO?

Off-Page SEO refers to the techniques that you apply to other web pages and internet platforms to increase your site visibility in SERP.

Off-page SEO as the name implies is different from On-Page SEO, where On-Page SEO deals with implementing SEO strategies to your websites and web pages, whereas Off-SEO techniques involve creating website links and brand building techniques by using other site platforms.

Most of the people relate the off-page SEO strategies to the link building exercise but it is more than that. It deals with commenting, relationship building, influencing people, creating authorship and creating engagement on social media platforms.

Why Off-Page SEO is important for my site?

Before we set about, let's understand how Google or other search engines work. Search engines crawl through your web pages and rate your web pages, based on the on-page SEO factors applied to your web pages. The on-page SEO and off-page SEO together determines your web page ranking in the Google SERP.

Particularly, off-page SEO practices allow Google to understand how well your website content is liked by the visitors, shared on the social media and bookmarking services and linked to other sites.

In this matter, the website content and how neatly it is organized plays a vital role. Only quality content can help you get the quality backlinks, shares on the social media platforms and bookmarking on bookmarking sites.

The benefits of having off-page SEO are:

Increases Domain Authority (DA): It helps to increase the Domain Authority of your website. Domain Authority is the metric created by MOZ to rate your website on the scale of 1-100. Higher the DA score, higher will be your ranking in the search engine. So, if you have a better DA score than your competitor's website then you will get a better ranking in the Google SERP. For more details on Domain Authority, this article could be very helpful.

Increases Page Authority (PA): Page Authority is the metric created by Moz to rate an individual web page score. DA will tell you rating of the entire website whereas PA deals with rating a single web page of the website on the scale of 1-100 (100 being the best score). The off-page SEO practices can help you get the external links (links from other web pages to your web page) from high authority pages to outperform PA score of your web pages.

Increases ranking in Google: There are several factors that Google take into consideration for ranking your website. The PageRank(PR) is one the major factor that Google considers for displaying your website in top places. The off-page SEO techniques mentioned below will help you get better PR for your website and inside web pages and consequently better ranking in search engines.

Increases Brand Reputation: The off-page SEO techniques deals in developing and interacting with several marketers and webmasters and recognize how the world looks at your website. With the advancement of Google algorithms, several off-page SEO strategies which were followed in the past are no longer been used. Hence it leaves no option but to interact and create unique opportunities to build a brand reputation of your website through several methods.

Increases Traffic: Off-page SEO techniques increases your outreach to the end audience and hence increases the chances of getting more organic traffic, traffic from social media, bookmarking sites, web directories and referring sites. This enhances the chances of getting more visitors and creating several revenue channels through your website.

And, here are the Off-Page SEO techniques for better ranking:

1. Search engine submission

There is no guarantee that within a particular amount of time your site will be indexed by search engines. In the ideal situation, it takes around 2-3 months for a particular site to get indexed by search engines. It may take even longer or a shorter period if your website is not optimized or well optimized for search engines.

Whatever time it may take, but to fasten up the process you may manually submit your website for indexing to the several search engines. Google, Yahoo (though Yahoo search is powered by Bing it operates on different algorithms to display websites) and Bing accept manual URL submissions at the specified links.

Best SEO practices:

Below are the some important best practices to ensure your website gets indexed by Google (applies to Bing as well as Bing also follows the same methodology) as it is the most widely used search engine platform:

• Manually submit the URLs of new or updated web pages to the search engines mentioned above.
• Follow the instructions given by Google for webmasters in order to get your new or updated website indexed by search engine bots (also referred to as "Googlebots" or "spider") in lesser time.
• Create a sitemap.xml file containing all URLs of your website to ensure your website is indexed and all your web pages are crawled. The sitemap.xml file helps Google and other search engines understand the structure of your website. Crawlers read this file and crawl through all URLs mentioned within this file.
• Also, ensure you have written clear instructions on which pages you want to display in search engines and which one not by updating the robot.txt file.
  
  

2. Video marketing

5. Social media marketing

I have written a post on How to Get Traffic to Your New Blog, which covers social media strategy in great detail. Here we are going to have a look at it from the SEO perspective.

It has been often stated by Google authorities that Google doesn't consider your social media links as a direct ranking factor, but it helps determine the popularity of your blog by looking at the number of shares, likes, tweets, and retweets and if authoritative users are involved in these actions. So eventually looking at it, it seems that these actions influence your ranking in the SERP at the end.

Best SEO practices:

• Grow your reach by increasing followers on every social media platforms you use. Gather your niche audience under one platform by using social media platforms.
• Engage in communication with other users on these platforms and share articles from your site with them. Encourage them to further share it on social media platforms and sites. More the shares, more it will reach the audience and increases the chances of having more backlinks. Quality content plays a very important role here.
• Take polls and participate in a conversation with other users to increase engagement with other users.
• Twitter and Google Plus shares can appear in SERP and can drive traffic to your blog through an indirect path.
  

In this blog post, we will unravel an answer to the question "what is SEO and the importance of SEO in digital marketing". You might have heard the term SEO already, but for those who are new into digital marketing, the term may sound a little technical.

Mainly, this article will guide you on what is SEO, the importance of SEO in digital marketing, what are some benefits of SEO, and how one can do SEO for the site.

Let' unfold these questions one by one.

So, what is SEO?

We have heard the term SEO many times, which is often related to search engines, ranking, and web sites someway. Let's find out what does it mean.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization which simply means optimizing your website or blog for search engines. It involves a process of implementing techniques to increase a website's position on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP).

To increase ranking in search result pages, a blogger performs a certain set of actions that ensure a better ranking of his/her website. These actions are applied to various aspects and elements of the blog.

The SEO strategy applied to various factors like:

• A title
• Proper use of keywords,
• Hyperlinks,
• Meta description,
• Backlinks

All of these factors put together and optimized in the best way ensures a better position in search results for your blog.

Why does my website need SEO?

Benefits of SEO

So, how does SEO work?

Knowing the inner working of the search engines is a really tough task and it is something that search engine companies do not wish to share with the general audience.

It is fair enough not to disclose this information or else anyone with information will rank top in result listing and there wouldn't be any quality and relative content in the search results. People wouldn't trust a search engine for a reliable source of information. This would encourage people to make their website search engine focused rather than focusing on content.

Having said that holding the top position in SERP isn't a complete mystery.

So, how one could get on the top place in the SERP? There are two approaches to do SEO for the website. One is called white hat technique which involves legitimate methods one can apply to their web pages and sites to rank top in SERP.

Whilst another method involves tricks to cheat search engines and get a better position in SERP. The second method is called a black hat technique and it isn't the right way to get in top position. This method violates the search engine rules and if caught you may get penalized for your actions or search engines may completely ban your content from appearing into SERP.

The below-listed methods are legitimate ways to do SEO for a blog. These methods help our page to get the best-deserved position in the search engines:

• An attractive title
• Proper use of keywords,
• Descriptive hyperlinks,
• Meta description,
• Relative and quality backlinks

Search engines gather information about your web page and the content inside it through computer programs called spiders and crawlers. Spiders and crawlers read and analyze our web pages for the content we have provided. Once analyzed they assign a rank to your web page (the process is called indexing) based on the above-listed factors and our web page appears in the SERP.

The search engine algorithm is far more complex inside, operates on secret techniques, and keeps on changing from time to time. Thus, it is beyond the reach of any ordinary webmaster to predict. Though, we should try our best to optimize the content which is in our control.

Can I do SEO myself?

The answer to this question is "Yes, why not!".

Understanding SEO techniques is not much complicated. It is an easy process if done in the right way! We will have to be attentive and active to be in the competition. There will be our competitors trying many different things and to bit them, we will have to stay updated as per the changing demands.

Google Webmaster tool helps you understand the requirement of SEO friendly site. With Google Analytics service you can review your online website traffic and make necessary changes depending on the user's behavior to meet the desired goal.

There are plenty of other free and paid tools to assist you during the process. Tools like Google Keyword Planner helps to determine keywords for our blog post, OpenLinkProfiler helps you track the backlinks of your and competitor's website, know insight details of SEO strategies and many other tools like these.

The important thing here to note is that if you are planning to do SEO by yourself, consider how much amount of time you can dedicate to it. As it certainly demands an investment of time and hence it up to you to decide if you can afford to have that much of time spent on SEO or you need to invest that time focusing on other things.

Conclusion:

Finally, to conclude, we learned that SEO means optimizing our content for search engines so they understand our content and display our web pages and site in the best deserving place.

We learned how important it is to make our content search engine friendly. Having a content-rich site is not enough but it also needs visitors for growth.

We outlined the benefits of having SEO done for our site and these benefits are, search engines drive huge traffic to our blog, it helps to spread the brand awareness, we get better returns on the investment, we can grow our website to meet new demands and new customers coming through search engines.

Whether to do SEO by ourselves or not is our personal choice but most of the SEO related activities are associated with content creation and promotion strategies. i.e. when you create and promote your post. Hence from my perspective going for it has no harm. You should give it a try.

Thanks for reading. Please share and comment on this article if you really liked it.

I'll guide you on some more insights on the SEO tips and how you can optimize your web pages or blog posts for the search engines in my next article (13 On-page SEO Techniques for Better Ranking). Until then stay tuned. 😊

There are lots of ways to get traffic to a blog. However, things don't work as desired if it's a new blog. The article 'how to get traffic to a new blog' helps you to get the ball rolling in those initial days and boost traffic to a new blog.

I actively started creating content for Blogging Hacks in July 2017. In the coming time, I followed a planned approach to achieve certain goals. Eventually, these efforts paid off and helped me get new readers. Within just 2-3 months of starting this blog, I was able to get readers to my blog. Seeing visitors coming to your site gives you a feeling of being over the moon in those initial times.

A point to note, this blog post is written keeping new bloggers in mind. However, it does not restrict experienced bloggers to make the best use of these strategies and be benefitted from it. 

Let's start with it then,

Tip 1 - Good quality content helps you to get traffic to a new blog

It is uttermost important to have compelling content on the blog before you start looking for traffic sources. I have mentioned the same in my previous article too that in order to grapple visitor's attention, our blog post must have great content. A visitor will spend very little time on an ordinary blog, may not have any reason to stay back, and may not visit it again.

In order to keep the visitor tied up with the post, it has to be perfect in every sense. I will urge you to go through the article How to Write a Perfect Blog Post — 10 Tips to Consider in order to understand the effective way of writing after reading this post.

The content is the core of the blogging system and the only factor which will keep you stay in the long run. The more qualitative content you have more will be the chances of visitors revisiting a new blog. They may even follow a blog if the content is benefiting or helping them grow or gain knowledge.

Tip 2 - Communities on social media drive more traffic to a new blog

In the initial days, no one knows if your blog exists. Hence, to make people aware we will have to interact with them and tell them about our blog. But randomly asking people to visit our blog doesn't work. I tried that with my friend list, but it didn't work. Everyone works or has interests in different domains, has different likes, choices, lifestyles, etc. And also, why would anyone just listen to us if it is not benefiting them?

Social communities and groups can be very helpful in this scenario. Promoting our blog on the personal timeline/account may not reach the correct audience. Unless we have a large number of connections in the same niche as our blog is. Below sources would work best to promote our blog, ordered in simplicity to use and how effective these are:

Source #1: Traffic to a new blog through Facebook groups

In my opinion, this is the number one traffic source to get started. There are plenty of Facebook groups created by fellow bloggers to help each other. All bloggers gather here to promote their websites, grow their network, and discuss various blogging-related topics.

Join these groups and participate in the conversations. There are certain activities you can do here in these groups to get long-term benefits. These are:

• Creating Facebook Page: Create a Facebook page of your blog. Your blog is a new brand now, and it needs to be promoted as one. The FB page would help you share a blog post with a large audience and engage with them. Also, it will help you organize the fans into one place and have a platform where other Facebook users could join you.
• Getting Page likes: There are plenty of bloggers who are constantly looking for page likes on these groups. You can like their page and in exchange, share your page link to get likes/follows for the same. This is necessary to build an audience for a new blog. A Facebook user visiting this page may get influenced by looking at the number of likes and follows and may follow your page.
• Getting blog visits: Until you get established as a renowned blogger, you would like visitors coming from Facebook groups to your new blog. Share your blog posts within these groups you have joined. Let them know that you host a great content which could help them in a certain way. Also, visit their blog articles too.

Source #2: Getting traffic to a new blog through Pinterest pins

Everyone follows it: Pinterest could be another source of the traffic to a new blog. I didn't realize Pinterest could generate a huge amount of traffic until I noticed images and infographics specifically made for this purpose on a few famous blogs. Bloggers like Neil Patel, Harsh Agarwal, and Ana Hoffman have added plenty of infographics in their posts to drive traffic to their blog from Pinterest.

Followers matters: To get established on Pinterest we will need to have followers who can outspread our work to others. Follow the same strategy as we did on Facebook. Follow other's work and ask them to follow you back. It will help us get the initial followers to our Pinterest business account.

Whom to Approach: Approach Pinterest users who have started newly just like you, to follow you back on Pinterest. Established Pinterest users may less likely follow you. Obviously, they are doing promotion on a larger scale and you may not have enough content or followers to meet their expectations when interacting with you.

Effective Trick: A trick here to get larger exposure is, there is something called Group Boards (like Facebook groups where all users gather and share their work) which drives a really huge amount of traffic to a blog. But getting on these group boards is hard as nails.

Get Along: To get started, create enough boards (at least 10 or more) so others can start following you. Keep pinning regularly. I'll create another post on how we can go about creating a Pinterest account, creating beautiful images for pins, and Pinterest strategy, all in detail.

Source #3: Traffic to a new blog through Twitter tweets

Go Viral: Twitter could generate tons of visits to a new blog. If someone popular retweets our tweet or our tweet gets attention on a thread run by a famous person then it can create a huge opportunity for you. It can really help you get recognized as a blogger with a large audience in a shorter time.

Requires Dedication: The saddest part here is, it takes some amount of dedication and time to get started. I would repeat myself again, you will have to build a good amount of followers, just like other social media to get the attention of the established bloggers and users from Twitter.

Increase Followers: An app "Twiends" can help you get the initial followers to your Twitter account. Please be advised that constantly following/unfollowing too many people through this app may cause your Twitter account to get blocked. Twitter may also suspend your account permanently.

The Trick for the Safe Gameplay: Follow/unfollow up to 70 users on a daily basis to be in safe gameplay. Nonetheless, it helps you get established and in later days you can start tweeting without borrowing followers from such apps.

General Rules for Social Media:
While doing promotion on all these social media platforms, a few points to remember that add value to others and our work in return. No one would be interested to take a look at our new blog or any activities you participate in unless you recognize their talent. Hence appreciate other's work. Don't be spammy and keep away from the 'me' factor. Look what others are doing and genuinely participate in the conversation.

Let other bloggers know how helpful their blogs are or how interesting reading their article is. Believe me, this has helped me a lot to get acquainted with bloggers and new blogging-related things and even the outside knowledge from our niche which can help develop our personality better.

Tip #3: Write comments on other's blog post

Read Blogs: Do not hesitate to visit other's blogs while interacting with bloggers on social media platforms. If you find an interesting blog post, do read it. It usually takes 5 minutes or less time to read any blog post.

Write Comments: Do let them know what you liked about their article in the comments on their post. If the blog post is relevant to your niche, you may add a link to your post or blog in a comment. This would help you increase backlinks to your post which is a helpful technique of link building process.

Aha!! Few points to remember while commenting on other's work!

Writing a Perfect Comment: Please be a little descriptive while writing a comment on other's blogs. Too short comments like "Nice article!" or "Good post!" don't add much value to our comment. Also adding a link in our comment on a post that is not related to our niche may create a negative impact on our backlinks and SEO strategy. Hence refrain from adding a blog link into every comment you post.

Be an Influencer: A well-written comment can impress the author and he will less likely reject our comment as it adds value to his work. This comment may even influence other visitors to visit our new blog. People are generous enough as when they see a genuine comment, they do the same by visiting your blog. As a result, you will see increased traffic to your blog at the end.

Help Fellow Bloggers: Help other bloggers, if you come across any of such instances where you can guide other bloggers to make their blogging experience better. Some of them are really unaware of the basic things. You can help them get in a better situation and they might follow you and become regular visitors.

All these are the ways of social engineering, but they can help you earn a reputation and be renowned as a good leader if not a human being.

Tip #4: Get blog traffic through Answer sites

Where to Look for? Sources: You might have come across answering sites that offer a solution to various queries. You can visit sites like Yahoo! Answers, Quora, Answers.com, StackOverflow, and so on and start participating in the conversation.

Narrow Down the Search: The best way to start with these sites is, search for the topic of our blog post for which users are seeking the solution. For example, you have written a post on how to make tomato soup. Then begin your search on these sites with the query "how to make tomato soup".

The Perfect Answer Comprises: Click on any search results that might appear and write an abstract, but a little descriptive solution answering the question. Write a seductive answer, adding value to your feedback. Don't be spammy and greedy, while you write.

URL to Follow Up: At the end of the description, add the URL of the relating blog post. Don't be spammy and greedy, while you write. 

I have written a blog post on Is Quora a New Source to Drive Traffic to Your Blog. Find out how does it work.

Tip #5: Get traffic to a new blog through bookmarking sites and forums

A thing of the Past or a New Approach: There was a time when bookmarking sites were at a peak to promote websites and blogs. With the time and the widespread of social networking sites, bookmarking is no longer considered as an option to drive traffic at a massive scale.

Where to Look for? Sources: But still, with the right approach sites like Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg, and BizSugar can help you drive traffic to a new blog. You have to follow the same approach. You need to engage yourself in the conversation with other fellow members and add value through your engagements. You will have to follow other's content on a great deal instead of just promoting your own pieces of stuff.

The Reddit Trick: On a Reddit-like platform, where members merely pay attention to any outsiders, you will have to create a friendly relation with other members to gel with. To be successful on this kind of platform, you need to submit links to narrowed directories. Add yourself to the only activities which are relevant to our niche.

I would suggest going with this option as a last choice. But if you have a strong grip and reputation on these sites, then there is a long way to go.

Tip #6: Writing Guest Posts to get traffic to a new blog

The Most Effective Way: Guest posts could drive a huge amount of traffic to a new blog than any other source mentioned above that too in no time. Hence always keep looking for such opportunities over social networking sites or on other's blogs while promoting our content.

Shortlist the Opportunities: Make a list of the successful bloggers in your niche. They have a huge fan following in the millions and thousands of visitors on a daily basis. If anyone has enabled guest posting, don't lose the opportunity to step towards success.

Stealing Traffic like a Ninja: When you write a good guest post for someone else's blog, it creates curiosity in the mind of visitors. Visitors would like to know more about you and your work. As a result, the traffic from the original owner of the blog gets diverted to your blog. Once you are established there is no looking back.

Tip #7: Overall presentation and design

Also Pay Attention Here: The blog content, traffic, and all those things mentioned above being at the right place, yet if the final presentation of the content is not up to the mark, then our traffic wouldn't be sustained for a long time.

Learning from the Mistakes: I have experienced this with my other blog where I had regular visitors coming from the organic traffic source. Though I made a few changes in the design which was not good and resulted in less traffic.

Make it Presentable: Hence, spend adequate time making necessary changes in the overall design of the new blog. Always strive to make the blog post presentable in the best way possible.

Tip #8: Finally, wait and let time take its course

Hard work will be Paid Off: Google will display our content and will drive traffic to our new blog if not now, in a few months. But it takes usually 7-8 months to get organic traffic. Every successful blogger you have heard of has gone through this phase. Even for them, it has taken years of time and experience to reach the position they are in now.

Youtube: These are the few traffic sources available for free to gain initial visitors. Also, many top bloggers take the help of YouTube as a source to get traffic to their blog and make money through YouTube channels as well. But that is a long row to hoe.

Conclusion:

To get established and make our roots strong my advice would be, pay attention to only 2 or a maximum of 3 social media channels to promote the content. Successful bloggers have helping hands and premium services to juggle all the balls. Whereas in the case of a new blogger, it is just an individual and no aid taking care of the things. A jack of all could be master of none. Hence, only be consistent with 2 to 3 social media channels and get the best of it.

Along with these, you will also have to pay attention to SEO tactics. There are various ways of getting paid traffic too. From Google AdWords to that of all leading social networking sites with the premium services provides you instant traffic. It is up to you how to make it there.

Lastly, you have stepped into this ever-competitive race (don't be scared, it is not at all scary as it sounds). Hence, you will have to learn a lot of new things. If someone says no, you can not do this. Take it as a challenge. There are a lot of resources available for free which can help you get over the situation. Google and other search engines will slowly recognize your hard work and will start displaying your site in search results, in return the TRAFFIC.

Thanks for reading. If you really have liked this post, please do not forget to follow and share. 💖💗💖
If you wish to see more or have any suggestions on this post, do let me know through your comments. I'll try my best to answer them all.

Wish you all the best!