The Ultimate Guide to Off-Page SEO

With a plethora of complex algorithms, Google is consistently improving in understanding the searchers’ intent. No longer does it rely solely on popular keywords instead, deliver quality content that can address the users’ requirements. One of the primary objectives of Google is to enhance user experience. 

Off-Page SEO helps the business to fulfill the Google’s primary requirements. Off-Page SEO involves improving search engine and user perception of a site’s popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority. 

As the year progresses, new trends suddenly pop up, giving the whole world some new things, and some novel techniques of marketing. For website owners, this gives them some new off-page methods. Strong backlinks are still at the forefront of off-page SEO. This helps you get more viewers into your website and make your website get a better Google ranking.

Table of Contents

What is Off-Page SEO? 

Why Off Page SEO is Important?

How to Do Off Page SEO?

Off-Page SEO technique, is sometimes called off-site SEO or Link Building. This guide will help you through the key things you need to look at if you want to perform off page properly. 

What is Off-Page SEO?

Search engine optimization can be broken down into two parts, off-page and on-page SEO. On-page SEO consists of factors that a website owner can directly manipulate on their site. Off-page search engine optimization refers to the digital signals, outside of one’s own website that marketers can influence indirectly. Off-page SEO is not always just about backlinks. Off-Page SEO is all about building your reputation by developing relationship with all the internet channels. 

It refers to all the measures that can be taken outside of the actual website, in order to improve its position in search rankings. These measures are meant to reflect your website’s social credibility and industry authority.

Off Page SEO is deeper than it looks. Smart bloggers don’t just rely on backlinks but they create brand awareness and create social signals. Off-page SEO simply tells Google what others think about your site. There is a lot to take in when it comes to off page SEO, but we’ve broken everything up into three parts: 

• Backlinks to the website
• Brand Mentions
• Social Signal around your website

What is Backlink?

Backlink is the hyperlink from outside domains that point to the pages on your domain. To achieve higher rankings on search engine results, you need to compete with other websites. Backlinks help to get the vote if it wants to rank on first page. Backlinks can be counted as a “vote” of confidence for the content that’s being linked to on your domain from outside sources.

Search engines use links to crawl the web; they will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl the links between entire websites. 

Moz has categorized backlinks into three depending on the nature of their existence: 

• Natural Links are editorially given without any action on the part of a page owner. To achieve these types of links, you need to give a good reason to someone to do so.
• Manual Links are acquired through deliberate link-building activities. This includes things like getting customers to link to your website or asking influencers to share your content. It involves manually contacting website owners and bloggers, asking them to link to you. Again, you need to give them a reason to link to you, and to be successful, you need to be contacting people who are relevant.
• Self-Created Links are created by practices such as adding a backlink in an online directory, forum, blog comment signature, or a press release with optimized anchor text. They inherently carry less weight than the other types of links.

Backlinks can affect your organic rankings to varying degrees, therefore the practice of creating  backlink should be done carefully. Follow two important factors such as: 

• Relevance
• Authority

You can have the most authoritative backlink in the world, but if it’s not relevant to your niche or industry, your pages will have difficulty ranking well. On the other hand, if you have a highly relevant backlink from a site that doesn’t have any authority in your industry, you’re still going to find it difficult to rank. 

What is Brand Mention?

Google loves brands and prefers to rank branded websites on top of the results. While Google does give value to brand mentions, even if they are unlinked, links provide far more SEO value as the primary off-page ranking signal. 

According to Neil Patel, “Brand Mentions (your site URL or brand name mentioned on another site without a hyperlink) are an integral aspect of off-page search signals.” 

Increase brand mentions by engaging with high-quality backlinks, social media audiences and work to provide valuable answers whenever possible to build authority and trust.

Turning brand mentions into links also gives you the opportunity to establish new relationships with other authoritative sites. This improves your chances of getting even more links from their sites, which serves you in the long run.

When it comes to off-page SEO, brand mentions seem to be just as important as backlinks to your website.

What is Social Signal?

Social Signal means sharing your link on social platforms which create no-follow links and generate relevant real traffic to your site.  The importance of social signals is increasing with time so improving online visibility or brand awareness, positive reviews and decreasing bounce rate. 

Websites with a strong social presence are more easily shareable and accessible, and thus easier to recommend. Search engines can also analyze these shares as recommendations, boosting the credibility (and rankings) of the website.

Why OFF Page SEO is important?

If you’re going to compete and thrive online, you need to create exposure, trust, brand awareness and a sense of authority. Popularity, quality, and relevance are also important to the website. 

Off Page optimization is tremendously valuable because it tells search engines that your website is important to others on the web. Every link that you receive acts as an endorsement from another source that your website is top quality. Off Page SEO indicates how the world perceives your website, and establish your brand awareness.

Google takes into account many off-page factors when deciding if and where to rank web pages. Links are one of those factors, but there are many others. 

More Business Exposure: When a website ranks in the top positions: it gets more links, more visits, and more social media mentions.

Higher Rankings & Traffic: The website will rank higher in the SERPs and this also means more organic search traffic.

Establish Trustworthiness: Google has recently introduced the concept of Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness (E-A-T), which plays an important role in rankings and is directly related to off-site SEO.

Improves Domain Authority: If part of your off-page SEO strategy includes building backlinks from high-profile websites, you should notice a pop in your DA.

How to do OFF Page SEO?

SEO is a complicated subject and it’s constantly changing and evolving. As Google changes its algorithms, SEO need to keep up with the changes. As you can see, much of off-page SEO has changed throughout the year thanks to Google’s algorithm updates. Quality links and content are rewarded, and those who don’t abide by Google’s guidelines are penalized. 

Off Page SEO make your brand shine in a sea of other brands, all fighting to get among the first position in SERPs. 

Let’s get to the ultimate off-page SEO techniques checklist and learn some lessons for future marketing strategies.

Link Building

Link building is the most popular marketing technique that can help improve your website position in SERP. Search engines take into account both the number and quality of your backlinks (as well as the number of referring domains), but quality is much more important than quantity. 

It has been recommended that a single quality backlink from an authoritative site is worth more than 10 or even 100 low-quality links.

Links are translated as votes or applause to your website, an overall appreciation of your brand.

Links are of two different types: 

Nofollow Backlinks: 

If a link is set to nofollow, it means Google bot won’t crawl the link and won’t pass any link juice.

<a href= url  rel=”nofollow”>Example1</a>

<a href= url   rel=”external nofollow”>Example2</a>

Both of the above links having nofollow keyword in their real tag, which means they are nofollow links. Even though nofollow link doesn’t pass any link juice, it helps you to bring traffic towards your website, so if you are making No follow links then there is no harm.

Dofollow Backlinks: 

Dofollow link passes link juice and they definitely help you much, in order to achieve good page rank. As it instructs search engine spiders to follow this link.

<a href = url   rel=”external”>Example3</a>

If you find no rel attribute in link then also it’s being treated as a dofollow link.

Let’s talk briefly about each off-page SEO activity below.

Influencer Outreach

Add a community-driven section to your article and reach out to well-known influencers in your niche and request that they provide their valuable insight via feedback, quote, or a review. Start connecting with them, but beware, you have to make sure you don’t overlook them in time. Keep in touch with them, ask for their advice and feature them in your pieces of content.

Guest Post

Become guest author. Be fair, and make giving actionable, fresh, and relevant information to bloggers without starving for backlinks. There are a number of blogs open for the guest post. You just need to identify the keyword you’re interested in and then search on Google. By writing guest posts from time to time, it will help you build quality backlinks, trigger more organic traffic to your website, and display a professional conduct by writing to others too. 

Broken Link Building

Broken link building is an interesting strategy that involves finding resources in your niche that are no longer live, recreating a version of the content and reaching out to webmasters who link to that content asking them to replace the broken link with a link to your newly created resource. By looking at the  competitors’ broken link, you can hit the jackpot on time saving. Being a competitor, it’s likely that we have content similar to what our competitors had on their website already. 

Make broken link building faster by using the broken links report in Ahrefs to find broken pages on your competitors’ websites. 

Forums Posting

A forum is an online discussion site having a ton of authority that can help boost the authority of your own site. 

Forums posting is very effective part of link building because with forums posting your websites will have do follow quality one way links and also receive lots of organic traffics. Forums help you drive targeted traffic to your site and allow you to establish relationships with influencers in your industry.

Find forums related to your industry and a sub-forum that focuses on your industry.

Blog Commenting

When blog commenting is used properly, it can help gain exposure and form blogger-to-blogger relationships, when you engage with others in your niche by posting value-added commentary and support to other bloggers. Consider commenting on relevant blog posts where you can add valuable and helpful commentary, based on your expertise on the subject. You can mention your brand inside the body of relevant and useful tips, and make its appearance relevant there. 

Incorporate Videos and Images

When Google crawls your site they are looking for several indicators including page quality, relevance and keyword instances. Multimedia objects add value to all three of these metrics. Videos also increase a user’s Time On Page, an important indicator of page quality which seems to becoming more and more important every day. Off-site SEO is about getting attention to your website thanks to outbound activities, unrelated to your page contents. Hence, promote your business through videos, podcasts, infographics, quotes etc.

Social Bookmarking

While some internet traffic is direct or the result of natural search, a good proportion of it comes through referrers. Social bookmarking is a way of storing, organizing and searching for bookmarks of sources online with the help of metadata.

Social bookmarking sites can help build one-way links, to increase your brand’s visibility and drive small quantities of traffic that’s more relevant to your website.

Content Marketing

SEO has that quality content generates natural links. To earn links in today’s crowded content world, you need to take your stuff to the next level.

The first step is to find keywords in your niche that you can frame your content around. Find holes in the reigning content so that you can create something even better. Include your keyword in your page’s URL and include your keyword in title and description. 

Quora Answering:

One of the most common ways SEO professionals leverage Quora is to include it as part of a comprehensive link building strategy. 

Benefits:

• The content lives on the page it was added to permanently
• Posts by content creators have significant potential to be seen by more users than just their own followers
• Question pages create links search engines actually index

Below is a list of the types of links you can create on Quora that include this attribute:

• Answer submissions (both in the content body and as footnotes)
• Answer Wiki’s (requires admin approval)
• Self-published blog posts
• Submitting a link to Spaces (requires admin approval)
• User profiles

Press Releases:

Press Releases are a way of distributing and announcing events to the press. Google defines them as “an official statement issued to newspapers giving information on a particular matter”.

Write a piece of content that will then be distributed to news publishers that might be interested.

Having information about your company or an event published on big news sites is not only beneficial for your brand, but also for SEO.

It will help you build links rather quickly, the links are high quality and they’re all also completely natural and won’t result in any penalties.