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
In 2017, video marketing has really taken a boost on the internet and it will continue to grow in the coming years. Many website owners nowadays tend to do video marketing and add videos to their posts explaining the inside content.
As per the article by Kelly Reeves, 87% percent of marketers create video content. Peter Schroeder in his articles says that mobile video is expected to increase 11x between 2016 and 2020.
Hence if you have a blog or website which is firmly established then video marketing should be your next move to take your blog to the next level. However new bloggers should make their choice wisely as video marketing require skills and dedication to survive in the marketing.
Best SEO practices:
- Create high-quality video content that solves user's queries or provides information to the users.
- Create attractive snippets for the video that grabs visitor's attention.
- Write a catchy and descriptive title that visitors can not go unnoticed.
- Include important keywords in the title and place them at the beginning of the title.
- Strive to keep the length of videos within 4-6 minutes, as such videos keep visitors engaged and reduces bounce rate.
3. Image sharing
Image sharing has become one of the popular methods in recent time to drive visitors to your site and is a highly effective way of off-page SEO marketing.
People favor using new methods of SEO as technology is getting advanced. You can create several infographics, banners, graphics for your content and share them to get website traffic.
Images convey the key message very effectually than the text content and hence can help us to get visitors as well as backlinks to your site. Also, it requires fewer efforts and expertise to develop images to share them on several platforms.
One of the popular platforms with more than 200 million users for sharing infographics is Pinterest. Many websites which do not have image-driven content also incline to publish and promote their brand on Instagram and Tumblr like platforms.
There are various free image service providers (Pixabay, Pexels, Unsplash, etc.) and free tools (Canva, piZap, etc.) to create images for the platforms mentioned above.
Now when it comes to off-page SEO techniques for the images it can't be the same as on-page SEO techniques and so our alt text or filename is not going to help. Let's look into some of the best practices to follow for off-page image optimization.
Best SEO practices:
- Always use high-quality images for Pinterest pins. No buddy will like to see noisy, blur or small images in your pin.
- Go for taller or vertical pins as these images will more likely get noticed by users than those small images.
- Write a thoughtful and strong description for pinned images. This will help to display your images in search results when someone makes a search for it.
- Research on keywords to be used for your pin by performing a search on Pinterest for similar image and write headlines accordingly.
- Pin consistently to pull the attention of the rest of the users.
- Add home-page or web page link in your image pin.
- For Instagram images, add watermark or logo in your image. It will help you promote your brand.
- Add your keywords to the image by using hashtags. There is no way to add a web page link. Even if you add it in comments, it wouldn't work as Instagram doesn't allow it.
4. Link building strategies or backlinks creation
Link building is nothing but the creation of links on other sites that points a link to your site. These external links are called backlinks of your site and the process of creating backlinks is called link building.
Link building is one of the most important technique in off-page SEO strategies. But, getting backlinks from the low-quality site wouldn't take you anywhere. In fact, Google says in their article that in order to get a higher rank for the website, a webmaster should try to get links from the high-quality websites.
Hence, one quality link from a good quality site could be a lot better than 100 low-quality sites. When Google crawls your web pages, they keep a log of content being shared on the web page by indexing them. They analyze your keywords as well as the number of links from the external sites and authority of these external sites.
Best SEO practices for a link building:
- While you promote your site on various platforms don't just share links of your site. Along with it indulge in engaging interaction with others, try and learn what they are doing for their site. Build a friendly relationship with other bloggers which will help you in your blogging experience.
- Use important keywords for the anchor text of the incoming links.
- Build the brand by sharing your site on the right platforms where visitors from your niche gathers and letting others know about your website.
- Try to get backlinks from the trusted and high-authority websites from your niche.
- .edu and .gov websites have high authority and hence try to get backlinks from these sites.
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.
6. Social bookmarking
Back in the time, people used to save the links of the important sites by bookmarking them in the web browser to read them later. But the risk here is whenever a computer crashes all these important bookmarks are gone.
After a time, social bookmarking sites came into existent where users can bookmark several site-URLs and save them under their profile. These bookmarks can be shared with other users and hence increases the chances of getting more exposure to your site.
Best SEO practices:
To conclude, we had a brief look at what off-page SEO means. It means building quality links, authority and creating engagement with the audience outside the boundary of your website. We also had look at how off-page SEO helps to increase DA, PA, ranking in Google, branding of your site and traffic to your site.
We look at some of the effective off-page SEO techniques for better ranking. So just getting backlinks is not enough. These backlinks have to be from qualitative and high authoritative web pages. 1-2 high-quality backlinks are as good as 100 low-quality backlinks. Along with backlinks user engagement and value addition is also equally important.
Lastly, good quality content is the base of your SEO efforts. Quality content gets more user engagement, it gets more shares on social media as well as it gets more backlinks from other users. Hence, always focus on writing good qualitative posts.
Thank you for your time. Please support me by sharing this article on your social media profile.
- Write catchy titles to grab the attention of the users and write a short but relevant description of your blog post.
- Know the correct timings when users are active on these sites. Your post should grab the attention of the users in the first 24 hours of your adding the bookmark link. Hence, know the best timing for bookmarking and make proper scheduling accordingly to make the best out of it.
- Engage and create a good rapport with the other users. So when you share your link on bookmarking site these users will support you by voting and may influence other users to vote for you.
Conclusion:
To conclude, we had a brief look at what off-page SEO means. It means building quality links, authority and creating engagement with the audience outside the boundary of your website. We also had look at how off-page SEO helps to increase DA, PA, ranking in Google, branding of your site and traffic to your site.
We look at some of the effective off-page SEO techniques for better ranking. So just getting backlinks is not enough. These backlinks have to be from qualitative and high authoritative web pages. 1-2 high-quality backlinks are as good as 100 low-quality backlinks. Along with backlinks user engagement and value addition is also equally important.
Lastly, good quality content is the base of your SEO efforts. Quality content gets more user engagement, it gets more shares on social media as well as it gets more backlinks from other users. Hence, always focus on writing good qualitative posts.
Thank you for your time. Please support me by sharing this article on your social media profile.
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