SEO Basics: Everything You Need To Know About Off-Page SEO

Now that you have performed all On-Page SEO tasks and your website is all primed and ready to go, it’s time to have a look at what you can and should be doing for your website as Off-Page SEO activity. What is Off-Page SEO after all? It sums up all the activities and tasks you perform away from your website with the ultimate goal of getting your website to rank higher in the search results.

According to Dr Peter Meyers (Moz), website owners spend about 30% of their time on Off-Page SEO activities. Of course, content plays a crucial role in your Off-Page SEO strategy and while there are many techniques that you can use and should experiment with in order to find your sweet spot, here are a few of the most popular Off-Page elements you can consider approaching when it comes to Off-Page SEO:

Link Building

Many might associate Off-Page SEO with link building and while this is an essential element of any Off-Page SEO strategy, there are other factors that will have an impact on your website’s ranking. However, still a crucial factor for your SEO success, link building is what will get Google’s attention. Without links pointing back to your website, search engines can’t really determine whether your content is valuable, meaning they don’t really have enough information to give you a high ranking position, even though you might have lots of useful online content.

It might not seem that obvious, however, with link building, it all starts with your internal pages. It is important to optimise your internal pages as the first step before going ahead with your link building strategy. “Site owners are often tempted to skip initial preparations for link building. But it’s important that you give this top priority, because preparing a site will ensure that you’re mindful of the links you sent to them.” Neil Patel, The Ultimate Guide to Off-Page SEO

One of the most important aspects of link building is that you should build and chase quality links. There are three types of links you need to be aware of:

Natural Links 

Also referred to as “editorial links”, these are the ideal links that any SEO professional is hoping to get. You don’t need to ask for them, natural links come as a result of great content and industry knowledge on the topic you’ve chosen to write about. When someone links back to your website because they want to share it in their content, that is an example of a natural link.

Manually Built Links

Probably one of the most common link building tactics, manually built links are the ones you ask for by reaching out to bloggers, influencers, website owners or other individuals within your industry. Having great, educational content that adds value to your audience is a great way to make sure that your links are worth sharing by other people.

Self-Created Links 

Frown upon and generally seen as black-hat SEO, self-created links are used to trick the search engines into determining that your link is valuable, when in reality, it’s not. Nowadays, SEO specialists avoid this completely as new algorithms are penalising these practices and will make it even harder in the future to do link building.

According to Moz, a few examples of self-created links may be:

• Blog comments that are not moderated
• Press releases with optimized anchor text
• Article directories
• Guest post signatures
• Advertorials
• Embeddable widgets
• Infographic embeds
• User profile pages
• Guestbooks
• Forum signatures
• Directories that are not moderated

Being a Guest Author

In the digital space, it’s likely that there are many blogs and websites out there that specialise in your field and there’s also a high chance they’re open to people contributing as guest authors. This is your chance to publish relevant and engaging content while building high-quality links for your business. You can find high-ranking websites that you think are appropriate for your content and reach out to them to suggest a guest blog on their platform.

Find Broken Links

A great technique suggested by the Digital Marketing Institute is to scour blogs (particularly influencer blogs) in your field for broken links, and then suggest replacing the broken link with content you’ve written on the same subject.

Keywords

Probably the second most popular term when talking about SEO, keywords play a crucial role in the organic traffic you are getting to your website as the keywords you associate your website’s content with should reflect the search queries, the words people type on Google or other search engines to find what they’re looking for.

Keywords shouldn’t be just the words or short phrases you’re targeting, but they should also be part of your content so make sure you include your main keywords in the article, infographics, other digital assets you are publishing on your website. You can also look at working your primary keyword into your URL, an H1 tag on the page, the meta description, and alt attributes of images on the page; all of these places will help clue search engines in on what your content is really about.

They’re usually split into two categories:

Head Keywords – These can be popular search keywords that have a lot of search volume because they represent a broad topic or a well-known concept.

Long-tail Keywords – These are usually more specific and longer keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they’re closer to a point-of-purchase or when they’re using voice search.

Domain Authority

Also known as DA, the domain authority represents the search engine ranking score that ultimately influences and predicts how high your website will rank on SERPs results. Ranging from 1 to 100, the higher the score, the better chance of ranking high on search engine result pages.

A large number of high-quality external links will help you increase your DA score, however, it’s quite difficult to influence your DA directly. This consists of a mix of metrics, as well as link data and together, they will determine your authority score. This was done intentionally; this metric is meant to approximate how competitive a given site is in Google search results. Since Google takes a lot of factors into account, a metric that tries to calculate it must incorporate a lot of factors as well. (Moz) 

Social Media Engagement

We often don’t realise just how much other marketing activities influence SEO and social media is definitely one of them. Engaging on social media with other accounts and getting people to connect with you and share links of your website, as well as redirect their followers to one of your links is a great technique to help your website rank higher on SERPs as all of this engagement adds more value to your online content.

Videos and Static Visuals

Believe it or not, videos, as well as images are considered SEO elements as well and it is important to integrate them into your content in order to maximise your results. You can then submit backlinked content to various sharing sites, including image, audio, and video sharing sites.

All in all, SEO can turn out to be an amazing marketing tool for you to grow your business, drive more organic traffic to your website and raise more brand awareness while providing your audience with great content that really adds value to them. This will boost your credibility as a company and will increase your chances of getting new customers.

Do you feel like you could benefit from SEO activities but aren’t sure how to develop an effective SEO strategy? Luckily, we can help you with that, get in touch with us at hello@socialgamma.com and we can start creating an in-depth SEO strategy that will help you achieve your goals.