Off-page SEO is NOT just about backlinks as most people think.
It involves your overall website trust, authority, social signals and many other things.
Don’t just rely upon on-site optimization if you want higher rankings.
Whenever you publish a new post or page, make sure to know the off-page SEO factors in the infographic below and then I will discuss in more detail techniques to use.
Off-Page SEO Factors
Source: Shanebarker.com
The off-page SEO techniques discussed below can improve your overall website authority and rankings on Google searches.
Get Authority Backlinks
Backlinks are the most important off-page SEO factor when it comes to a business website.
Why? Because search engines trust your website more if your site has authoritative relevant backlinks.
When Google looks for fresh content, it indexes your new pages and makes them available for search users.
When relevant search queries are triggered, Google uses algorithm facts to determine whose pages will rank.
We call these Google ranking factors in SEO terminology.
Here are the most important factors Google considers while ranking:
The number of linking or referring domains: The number of domains linking to your site is one of the most important ranking factors.
Authority of a linking page: The links from authority websites are considered more than links from low authority pages. Yes, try to get links from high authority pages.
The number of linking pages: It is always recommended to have more links from individual domains rather than from a single domain.
Authority of linking domains: A link from a low authority page on a high authority site is better than from a low authority one.
Count the number of do-follow links: As Google officially stated it won’t count no-follow links, it only considers do-follow links.
Contextual links: The links within the content of the page are worth more than the links in a sidebar.
Links from a homepage: The links from a homepage of a linking domain carry more strength than those on one of its pages.
Link relevancy: The links from pages related to the topic of your page carry more relevancy for search engines.
Google views your website as more valuable than others if you have a lot of backlinks from authoritative websites.
Google analyzes where the link comes from, the quality of the link, and how fresh the link is.
How to Get Those Authoritative Links
#1. Guest blogging: Guest blogging helps a lot in acquiring great links.
The only challenging task here is you need to do a lot of research on the topic.
Then you need to find out the top blogs in your niche and submit your pitch.
If they accept then your article gets published.
#2. Broken link building: To earn links this method can be faster than guest blogging.
Did you know lots of links on some authority blogs are actually dead?
Why does this happen?
If hosting expires or during the migration of the sites, links are bound to break.
The one good point is broken pages don’t affect your site’s ranking.
But it does give a bad experience to users.
Conduct a backlink analysis on your niche websites.
Find broken links and contact the owner to let them know about their dead links.
There are chances they will do a return favor by including your link on their website or you can offer a replacement link too.
#3. Create compelling infographics: If you want to attract a huge audience and acquire authoritative backlinks, then infographics work best.
Ideal customers usually respond to visual content better than plain text.
Infographics can go viral if you promote them enough.
When people share your infographics, it continuously generates organic traffic to your blog and then backlinks.
#4. Improve Your Social Media Signals
Social is the NEW SEO.
Below is an image which tells you how social media impacts your SEO.
Source: Modgirlmarketing.com
If someone wants to know more about your brand, they check your presence on Twitter, Facebook, and of course other social media channels.
Share your content in the form of articles, images, or video.
Join related groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and share the content there too. It helps in connecting with potential users.
Users go to Quora.com more to get an answer rather than Google or Bing.
Make the best use of it.
Post your content in relevant sections or threads on Quora.
One important note to remember here is, never do any promotion on this platform.
Write really useful answers to the questions related to your niche and give your blog link at the end of the answer.
#5. Focus On Your Keywords
If you want to get more out of off-page optimization, target the right keywords.
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The #1 factor which controls SEO is the keywords you choose.
If you want to create a great content campaign, keywords are the essential building blocks for it.
The below diagram depicts the more accurate view of on-page SEO.
Source: Moz.com
#6. Perform site audit: You can use tools like SEMrush for finding and fixing website SEO related issues.
You can find out all the reasons why your site is not ranking well on Google.
#7. Optimize your content: Content is always king.
You may not use the right keywords but if it looks great then nothing can stop it from going viral.
Help your audience by creating useful and helpful content.
Use visuals and integrate data into your blog posts.
Your audience tries to know more about you if you really give them valuable content.
#8. Use different keyword phrases: Focus on using different keyword phrases, generic content, and brand names in your content so Google will consider your links natural.
Which means your links shouldn’t have exact match keywords in their anchor text most of the time.
#9. Contribute To Other Sites: In the world of SEO, guest blogging is very common.
But it’s something many SEOs think is too challenging.
What do you get by contributing to other sites?
- It helps to build your authority.
- It can bring you a lot of referral traffic.
- It helps in building links.
While writing guest posts for other sites, don’t link too much to your site.
It spoils your relationship with the site owner.
Even if you are writing a guest post for others create awesome content.
#10. Submit To Directories and Forums: To get more visibility, submit your website and content to directories and forums.
Here are the sites where you can submit your blog content to enhance more visibility:
Social bookmarking sites:
These are the best platforms to promote your stuff.
When you post on popular social bookmarking sites it helps in gaining more traffic to your blog.
Some of the best sites are: Stumbleupon, Slashdot, Digg
Submit to forums:
Make sure you participate in each forum related to your niche and build connections with the community.
Make the best use of do-follow forums. Some of the forum sites where you can submit are: Blokube and Blog Engage.
Blog directory submission:
It takes time to get better results but it definitely helps in the long run.
Select a proper category under each directory and start submitting your posts.
Question and answer sites:
You will get a good amount of traffic from question and answer websites.
Join those sites and search for questions related to your niche then give helpful answers to any question.
Don’t forget to give your blog link at the end of the answer.
You can use sites like Yahoo Answers and Quora.
Share your videos on these sites:
If you are using videos submit to these sites to get your videos more views.
It is a good way to get quality backlinks.
The sites which have high authority are: YouTube and Vimeo.
Image submission sites:
Make sure you optimize your images with the correct URL and title tag before submitting to these sites: Flickr, Instagram, Tumblr, and Imgur.
Submit your infographics:
Make really impressive infographics and submit to these sites.
Give reference links to your website.
Some of the infographic submission sites are: Visual.ly, Reddit, Submit Infographics, and Infographics Archive.
Share to document sites:
Create documents related to your niche.
Make sure you create unique and helpful pdf’s or ppt’s.
Upload to these sites: Issuu, Slideshare, and Scribd.
All the sites mentioned here have high Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA).
No doubt, performing off-page SEO will give you better rankings to your website in the Google search results.
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