This post was last updated on May 24th, 2021 at 02:43 pm
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When it comes to SEO, I’m sure some of you may find it confusing. Me too. In fact, we have discussed On-Page SEO and still, there are two types of SEO that I want to inform you about.
If you want to drive massive organic traffic to your site, plus true brand awareness, then you’re in need of some really effective off-page SEO practices.
Before we jump in to talk about off-page SEO, we should look back to my simple SEO guide for bloggers in the first place.
And here we are! The rest of this post will tell you about off-page SEO tactics and explain how you can execute them to improve your site’s visibility, authority in search, and drive organic traffic.
Table of Contents
What Is Off-Page SEO?
Unlike on-page SEO which focuses on optimizing your site or your content, off-page SEO uses tactics off of your site to increase your site’s authority. Click To TweetOff-page SEO techniques refer to optimization activities you can do outside your website. Anything taking place outside of your website and contributing to your ranking is considered off-site SEO: social media marketing, influencer marketing, mentions (direct or indirect), guest blogging, so on.
We can put it like this.
On-page SEO shows Google what a website is about and helps Google see that a page or post is a good search result because it is useful and relevant. While off-page SEO shows Google that a website is important and valuable and see that because the brand and website are popular and authoritative.
Off-page SEO rhymes with words like link building or promotion activities. By developing better off-page SEO means you are trying to prove to your audiences and search engines that your site is relevant, authentic, trustworthy in your industry.
Another difference is on-page SEO is active doing, while off-page SEO is passive, as you do it after you’ve worked hard to deliver the quality and uniqueness of your blog and content.
But, in terms of outcome, I can say that off-page is more important than on-page. Why? Having rich fresh content and a user-friendly site but no likes, shares, following, mentions, or links across the web is nonsense.
The benefits triggered by better off-page SEO are more traffic, more social media mentions, more visibility, and an increase in rankings.
However, both on-page SEO and off-page SEO greatly influence each other. That’s why the end result has to be considered before starting an activity, not after you’ve already done it. Start with on-page first, then jump to off-page SEO.
Why Is Off-Page SEO Important?
Search engines like Google might change the way their algorithms work or ranking factors might shift to new ones, but off-page SEO will still matter. Because your site or business needs thumbs up from your audiences, as well as linking fellows.
Without further ado, let’s get to the ultimate off-page SEO techniques checklist and learn some lessons for future marketing strategies.
Off-Page SEO Techniques
1. Link Building
Link building or building backlinks is the most important thing to remember about off-page SEO. It is so important, even though Google suggests that content is the #1 ranking factor. To attract links naturally, you will need to provide quality fresh content – the best of the best!
Links are applause to your website, an appreciation of your brand. However, the same link building effort contributed to the rise of what’s known today as black hat SEO.
Sometimes, people are so desperate to build links that they start playing with fire and perform the following: enroll your site in content directories, link exchange schemes, link networks, comment link (a.k.a comment signature), article directories, forum signatures, and so on.
Here are things that make a referring domain (link) valuable: popularity, the topic match between the two domains (is the link relevant?), anchor text, website trustworthiness, domain authority (DA), link freshness, and so on.
As for me, here three main types of links populate the web:
- Natural Links: a reader/user knows your content on your site and has a positive view over your services and links to your site as a sign of trust and appreciation.
- Self-created Links: I have seen a lot on other blogger’s sites or mine that some people add their website link in comments as comment signature (most of them enter in the black hat category).
- Manually Build Links: Links that gained through direct link building; asking the readers/user to link to your content or influencers to share your content.
The best and the wisest move would be to practice natural link building. And the best way to do this is to make your content worthy of links, and links will come naturally. Guest blogging is always a good idea but be careful not to overlink your site and make your post more spammy than useful.
Build your links at a normal pace, which is gradually, or else Google will think you’re doing some black-hat magic! Click To TweetIn addition, link building should be about quality, not quantity. You can go and seek for the high-quality links, but don’t make this stop you from linking to and getting links from smaller or younger brands, as long as the domains are good and are related to your niche.
Try getting links in and from huge link aggregators like Wikipedia (this is definitely a white has SEO move). On that same note, inbound links from non-profit (.org) and education (.edu) sites are especially powerful. These sites are huge domains that provide extremely high-quality links. To check your inbound links, you should perform link analysis and see what, from where, and what types of links you have from others.
2. Blog Commenting
Blog commenting is an excellent off-page SEO activity that drives organic traffic to your site and SERP ranking. But always be careful that blog comments can easily turn into a back hat practice.
There are tons of articles on the web on how to correctly do blog commenting and everything you have to do is one click away. But, the general is that you should definitely do it ‘white-hat’.
Don’t exercise so much on the comment signature. Give your insight on topics and attract attention to you. Just mention your brand inside the body of relevant and useful tips and make its appearance relevant there.
3. Guest Blogging
This is similar to blog commenting. By writing guest posts from time to time, not only help you build quality backlinks and trigger more organic traffic to your site, but also show that you are a professional blogger by writing not only on your personal blog but contributing to others too.
When you write a guest post for another site or blog, the site often lets you link back to your site in the post or author bio. This link adds a site to your backlink profile. It added the benefit of reputation building as your name and brand are being featured on another site.
But, sometimes guest blogs come to advertise their business or product and can turn into some spammy and annoying reading. So, make it fair, give actionable, fresh, and relevant info are your first concern – not the links to your site.
4. Broken Link
One of my Sunday blogging schedules is checking broken links on my blog. Surely you don’t want broken internal or outbound links on your blog because:
- It provides a bad experience for users. Users click on a link and expect to find a valuable resource. Instead, they are met with a 404 page or error message.
- It can negatively affect SEO. When a link is broken, it fails to provide additional context to the linking page, which can negatively influence its long-term SEO results.
Getting used to broken link building. Whenever you analyze your site, check your site for harmful links or malware domains sending a link to your site. Also, check the anchor texts. Many times I found that they happen to not be very relevant to my topic.
Anchor texts truly matter and they’re a clear indicator of the relation between your page and the linked one. That’s why I started to pay more attention to the words I add the outbound link on.
5. Social Media Engagement
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Google+ are the trends of the day. They surely know how to engage people, provide them with the means to be inspired, serve them the friends they need (although most of the time available only in the virtual world), serve them the shares and links they so much crave for.
Shares and likes are the social media magic tricks. They make your business grow and spread like wildfire. Whenever you share relevant, fresh, and engaging content with your community, you get new subscribers, audiences, fans, or leads.
Content is fire. Social media is gasoline. Click To TweetHere two things for you to consider when creating and activating on social media:
- Be responsive – people are bound to talk about you when they’re satisfied with your content/service/product, when someone asks for feedback, or when they’re unhappy with your site. Either way, engage with your following.
- Befriend – there are a lot of leaders, influencers, professionals, that could be very helpful in spreading the word about your brand/site. One, by sharing your content or mentioning you, two, by following you, or three, by simply influencing your self-development in the field. Build connections with social media and learn what’s good from them and what’s better to avoid.
A strong social presence builds authority and reputation. Make social media marketing a part of your SEO strategy by creating shareable content, adding social share buttons to your content, and having active social media pages. This increases your site traffic and views, which does have a proven correlation to improve SEO.
Wrapping Up
Keep in mind. One way is to write quality content, make your website super-friendly and eye-catchy, promote it properly, and links together with traffic will follow naturally. Another one would be to build a reader-focused online presence and concentrate on the searcher’s intent.
This stuff is part of on-page SEO but do you remember what we’ve previously said about on-page and off-page SEO? It was that successful off-page SEO follows good on-page SEO. So make sure to have good on-page SEO!
Actually, to be honest, there are so many ways to practice off-page SEO. You can find many sources on Google. Basically, I just want to share my useful tips for those who are still struggling with SEO.
Therefore, I need to do it first and then tell you guys which one is the easiest way and work so well! In this post, I only share with you what I have been doing so far with off-page SEO practice. This post will be updated nearly in the future as I’m still exploring and experimenting with my blog!
To end on a happy note, avoid playing with fire and practice black hat off-page SEO techniques. You can turn both search engines, visitors, and subscribers to enemies, get penalties from Google, get blocked by visitors, or blacklisted by subscribers. And nobody wants that.
So here is my free ultimate SEO checklist to help! Download the list now, start working on your SEO to drive more organic traffic, and get ranked by Google!
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I still get all muddled up when it comes to SEO and keywords especially. Thanks for reminding me about the broken links. I keep meaning to set that up.
Great post! I already follow most of this (checking broken links is a weekend activity for me too) but I did not know about “black hat” and about comment signatures. I learn something new every day. Thanks for sharing.
I am just learning about most SEO – I think I have nearly got on-site SEO but oh dear – adding off-site is going to be overwhelming. I am just trying take it one step at a time
Such excellent information here. Several are practices that I haven’t attempted for myself so I appreciate you sharing! I’ll have to begin enforcing these for my own blog in the future.
this post was very informative to fellow bloggers. SEO is so confusing & one i’m constantly working on & trying to perfect. this was the first time reading about on and off page SEO so thanks for sharing this!
These are some really good points! Link building is so so important especially xx
Hi Merry. Some great tips for off-page SEO there, thanks. I know that historically backlinks have always been viewed as the key to off-page SEO and the area where most attention should be focused. Is this still the case?
Great post! I try to check broken links as often as possible- although I’m probably not as regular about it as you are. Thank you for sharing this informative post x
This is a really interesting and helpful post – I’ve just started my SEO learning journey and feel so confused by it all but this post finally gave me a good understanding of the difference between on and off-page SEO and why I need to work at both!
I felt the same too when I just started – everything’s so confusing! Learn it one by one and implemented it on my blog really help me to overcome this SEO stuff 🙂
I am just learning about off page SEO. This was so helpful for me. Thank you so much for sharing your all knowledge!
Thank you for reading, Tiffany 😀
Having a broken link checker can be really useful, it will not only tell you what links no longer work that you put up on your site, but also ones that have been left in comments
Agree! Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me 😀
Awesome post! This was super informative and I enjoyed reading through and gaining useful tips!
Thank you for reading 😀
Really useful information — I must admit I’m still getting my head around it all even though I’ve been blogging for a long time. Thanks for sharing!
I am surprised by the number of people who seem to overlook the ‘social’ aspect of social media. It’s literally in the name! You’re not just there to use your platform as a sounding board, or it won’t benefit you at all. Instead, you need to engage, build connections and foster relationships.
This is so helpful! I’ve often wondered if blog commenting can drive SEO, so it’s interesting to know there is a wrong way to go about it, I’ll have to look into that for sure. Great post xx
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