In recent months, there have been debates over the fact that the ranking impact which can be derived through social media signals falls out of the ‘traditional’ link building category. And while this statement is valid and will continue to be debated over we cannot assume the fact that the majority of external factors affecting ranking fall within link building. What am I getting to? You are wasting time and burning your money if a thoughtful and effective link building strategy is not part of your SEO plan. Off-site or off-page SEO refers to optimization techniques which are not performed within your site. Basically, it is all about getting quality backlinks that are relevant to your topic assisting the search engines to establish a value for your page and what it really focuses on. You can look at it this way; each quality backlink is a vote of approval for your page. The more backlinks a page has, the greater its link popularity. Try the following advanced off-page optimization tips to market your website, build a reputation and improve your rank.
Off site optimization tips
- Blogging
Perhaps one of the most powerful ways to promote your company online, blogging enables you to keep your visitors hooked to your site. By writing interesting and informative blogs, you give your visitors a reason to come back again and again. As you can imagine, this means that search engines will be crawling through your site quite frequently further improving your rank in SERP’s. So what makes the best blog? For one, you need to provide unique content that includes lots of relevant information. Infographics, top lists, How to tutorials and viral videos are recommendable content for your blog. You also need to be clear on what you are conveying to your visitors, avoid beating around the bush and using filler content. Regular updates are also imperative if you do want to maintain a consistent readership. Promote your blog by posting comments on blogs that are within your niche and allow links in the comment section which are crawlable by search engines also known as Do-follow blogs. On the other hand, if you do not have a knack for creating compelling content, you always have the option of hiring a guest blogger to get the work done for you.
- Social media
Did you know that in the eyes of search engines, the web pages we bookmark at social bookmarking sites are considered as quality backlinks? This is why social bookmarking is crucial in off-site SEO. Therefore, make a point of submitting your latest blogs and pages to the most popular bookmarking sites. These include Reddit, Delicious, Digg and Stumbleupon. Depending on how effectively you have participated bookmarking sites can help you increase your website traffic tremendously.
- URL Selection
The links to your page should always have their primary keyword in the anchor texts. This consistency is important and will play a great role in signaling the crawlers on which specific URL to rank for a specific term. It therefore goes unsaid that you should avoid pointing links to the home page when link building for non-brand terms. You want URLs with the best chance of converting to be the page that ranks for a particular term; this is where diversification comes to play. On the same line, it is important to strive for a healthy combination of links coming in at your sub-category pages, category pages and product level pages. This means that if you are link building with the anchor text ‘Best SEO’ this should be pointing to your category level page which is effectively optimized for ‘Best SEO’ with an internal lining structure supporting the URL for the keyword. The power of proper internal linking can greatly improve your off-site SEO as weight is being transferred both upstream
to the category pages and downstream to the product level pages through navigation and breadcrumbs just to mention a few. Lastly, do not make to too many changes to the existing anchor texts as this will elicit negative attention from search engines.
- High PR sites links
Although it is not advised to obsess over links from high PR sites, do not waste your time on sites that seldom get updated either. And even though you’ll get as much value from a highly targeted low PR link as from an untargeted high PR link, keep in mind that search engines are not the only reason to have links. Good links bring traffic themselves, so focus on getting
high quality links from high profile sites. On the same note, avoid building links too fast. Hundreds of backlinks appearing on a site within a short period smells fishy and search engines will react by either discounting the links or penalizing the site altogether. Plus, if you do create a lot of links to a page then slow down the page will be considered stale by search engines and a result its ranking will suffer. The secret is slow link building that imitates the upward curve of organic link growth mostly exhibited by popular sites.
- Cross-linking
More aptly referred to as internal linking, cross linking is about linking to internal pages within your site. This practice helps increase your internal link popularity (a rather major factor of Google page rank algorithm) and should be done as often as possible. Take the example of Wikipedia, the best known example of successful internal linking. In addition, try getting a link from within the sites of related blogs and websites using a targeted keyword as the anchor text. Although this type of strategy is considered complex by many, this type of links are considered weightier by search engines.
- Community creation on social networks
Some refer to it as online reputation management; it involves becoming a member of the most popular social sites and creating a profile of your own. This helps extend your online network and build a reputation for your business; more like giving it a face.
Nowadays, good backlinks with targeted keywords carry so much weight and if well implemented can get high search engine rankings for terms that do not even occur on the page. Ignoring off-site SEO is no longer an option; do not underestimate the power of off-site SEO.
