Latest Off-Page SEO Techniques that work in 2020

Off page SEO is a technique that helps your website appear higher in search rankings. Off-page SEO is a type of search engine optimization that comprises of the myriad of techniques that SEO encompasses.

SEO is divided mainly to two: on-page and off-page SEO.  We have already talked about on-page SEO earlier, so let’s look at what off-page SEO does.

While on-page SEO optimises your site and its contents, off-page activities of SEO uses tactics off of your website to enhance your website’s authority. Off-page SEO is also known as “off-site SEO”.

It is the set of actions taken beyond the boundaries of your website that helps increase your rankings in search engine results pages(SERPs). 

The main factors that come to play in optimising off-site are the site’s relevance, authority, popularity, and trustworthiness. These help to improve search engine ranking and enhances user perception of the website.  

Off-page SEO accomplishes this by having other reputed websites or people on the internet linking or promoting your site. This will, in effect, “vouch” for the quality and genuineness of your content.

What is Off-page SEO

While on-page SEO tells search crawlers what your website is about, off-page SEO tells search crawlers how important and valuable your website is.

Difference between On-Page and Off-Page SEO

This can be best explained with an analogy. Imagine you bake delicious cookies. You can make them more inviting if they look better. This is the equivalent of on-page SEO. 

 But if you just bake them at home and no one knows about it, it won’t sell. You can place a sample of your cookies at a major supermarket or a stall at a football match so that people can taste your cookies and come back to you for more. This is what off-page SEO does. It draws attention to the great content you have on your website.

Off-page SEO shows search engines that your website is trustworthy, reliable, therefore getting us to the ultimate goal of often appearing on search results. The trust and authority of your website can be built in two primary ways, i.e., through quality links and reputation.

Off-Page SEO Activities

Every day, the search engine’s search algorithms and factors that account for ranking are constantly changing. And of all factors, it is widely believed that the relevance, trustworthiness, and authority given by a good off-page SEO is the leading factor that provides your website it’s ranking.

What are the benefits of doing SEO Off-Page Activities?

A successfully executed off-page SEO strategy will earn a lot of benefits for your website. They are listed below:

1 Hike in Rankings

A website with a higher ranking in the SERPs will mean that it can draw more traffic to the page.

2 Climb in Page Rank

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin invented the page ranking strategy. Page rank is a number ranging from 0 and 10 that indicates the relevance of a website to Google.

It was a revolution as it was one of the major reasons why Google was so successfully showing the most relevant results to a search query. But today, it is only one of the 250 ranking factors that Google employs to rank websites. 

3 Enhanced exposure

Higher rankings translate to greater exposure. This is because when your rank is high, your website gets top positions in search. This means it gets more visits, more links, and more mentions on social media. It is a cascade effect which is why everyone is racing to get their SEO on point.

4 Mark of Trust

Now, Google is always one, no far too many steps ahead in the game. So they have introduced something called Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) for websites.

By this, Google gives ranking to websites based on their expertise and authority on a particular subject.

For example, if you are writing blogs related to augmented reality(AI), and you are becoming a subject expert by posting blogs continuously on this subject, and the Google algorithm knows that you are an expert in this area, you are ranked higher.

But Google doesn’t make it easy. It uses other trusted sites and authoritative webpages’ endorsement of your site as an indicator of your expertise.

It’s like you could be an expert in mathematics in school, but it is proved only when your teacher(a higher authority) declares you are are you truly recognized. Google looks at the type of incoming links to your webpage to gauge your page. This plays an important role in ranking and is, therefore, directly related to off-page SEO.

Best Off-Page SEO Techniques List [2020]

Here we have an off-page SEO checklist to tick off for higher rankings in search results.

1 Link building

The best way to show your website’s trustworthiness and authority is by getting links back to your site. When the search engine sees that your site is valuable enough to be associated to and therefore linked by another site, it reads it as a signal that your site is relevant and trustworthy. Thus it is important to build links as part of off-page SEO techniques.

One should also know that not all links have the same value. Linking your website with random site won’t get you the required result. How should you build your links? Links can be categorised into three main types, based on how they were earned. They are:

1.1 Natural links

It is one that requires minimum effort. You don’t need to do any extra work for this- the blogger himself includes them while creating the content. If you are a technology blogger and you add a link of your favourite phone brand, then its called a natural link.

1.2 Manually built links

You need to collaborate with clients or influencers to get this link. You can ask them to share the link to your website or even share your content, thereby earning you a link back.

1.3 Self-created links

These can be made by adding a backlink as part of an online directory, as a blog posts’ comment signature, or even in a press release with the anchor text. Since these are easier to do and practised extensively for good or worse, they are sometimes frowned upon by search engines. It is best to go easy on this practice. 

Search engines value links based on the following factors:

2 Linking to authoritative sites

It is more valuable if you can get backlinks from sites with higher authority. 

2.1 The Relevance of the content across sites

The links must come from pages that are relevant to your industry or brand. These links carry more value.

2.2 Number of links

One should always prefer links from sites with a large backlink profile. They carry a higher value. Good websites have a lot of backlinks, and we need to aim to link to these sites.

2.3 Anchor text of the link

If links have anchor text that is relatable to your content or services, then your page will have more value. Anchor text is simply a word or words that you click on to follow a link. By clicking on this word, you will be able to open the page or document linked. It is also called “link text.” Anchor text on a typical website has a blue colour and is sometimes underlined to distinguish it from the rest of the text. Anchor text is the context for any writeup.

It is both useful for search engines and as well as human users. It’s like the references at the end of a book. It gives you a detailed idea about a concept that is mentioned in the book, but its explanation is beyond the scope of the book. Search engines browse anchor text to find clues on what the linked page is about. This helps them index and rank the page. 

3 Guest Blogging

It is an effective off-page SEO technique as it helps build both links and reputation. When you write a guest post for a performing website, the site will often allow you to place a link back to your website. This can either be in the post or author bio. Thereby adding a site to your backlink profile. If your name and brand are featured on another website, it is good for building a reputation.

4 Internal Links

Internal links are the links from one page to another on the same domain. All websites use internal links. When strategically used, internal links can greatly boost a site’s ranking in the search engine results. Google also uses internal links to discover new content. If you put up a new web page and don’t link to it from any part of your site, the web crawler will be unable to find it. This is because the page won’t be on your sitemap, and they won’t have backlinks.

When Google searches for new pages, it tries some pages that it has already crawled first. It discovers other pages when it follows links from a known page to a new one. Thus if your page doesn’t have internal links, they will be orphan pages and have lesser chances of being found by Google. Also, pages with more internal links have higher PageRank. The number of internal links to a page is an indicator of the relative importance of that page among other pages of your site.

Most websites use a pyramid strategy for webpages i.e., the top of the pyramid is their homepage and following it are the next most important pages. These could be About us, Services, Contact etc. Under those comes the less important pages. They can be products pages and service centres, individual blog posts, etc. Internal links of topically-related pages are usually grouped together in a process called siloing.

5 Brand Mention Links

If your brand is already popular or growing, it is possible that many websites already have mentioned you earlier. A quick search for your brand name, product name, taglines or service keywords can help you find the sites that have already mentioned you. If they mention your brand but do not link back to you, you can get in touch with them and ask them to add a link.

6 Broken Link Building

There is a sneaky method where you can research link by looking at sites with broken links. In some cases, the links on a website may be broken because the resource or source has been taken down o removed. You can grab this opportunity to replace the broken link on their site with one of yours. Be sure that the website is relevant to the content on your blog.

7 Competitor Research

Research on your competition the same way as you would yours. You can look to your competitors and find out what sites have linked to them. By doing this, you can know where your competitors’ backlinks come from. You can find new and similar opportunities for your site to get backlinks from the same websites. If your competitor is mentioned on a website, it probably is a relevant website for your product to be backlinked to. You can reach out to the sites and pitch them on linking your brand.

8 Reputation Building

Links as above, tell search engines directly that your website contains relevant, useful, and high-quality content. You can also employ other techniques to show that your website is of high quality and genuine. A few non-link related reputation building exercises can also help your webpage rank better. Find these steps below. 

9 Business Social Media and Directory Profiles

An easy and mandatory step is to create your business directory and profiles across social media. Profiles over various trusted platforms confirm that you are a legitimate business entity to the search engines. These platforms let you backlink your webpage. If you have a physical store, get on the Google My Business page. This makes your brand appear as a prominent result in search.

10 Social Media Marketing

It is vital to make social media marketing an important part of your off-page SEO strategy. Keep active social media pages, create shareable content and add share buttons on all of your content. A thriving social presence signals authority and reputation. With the help of brand fans who spreads your content, it will drive traffic back to your site.

11 Influencer Marketing

Influencers are the new celebrities. They have a large following and collaborating with them can build your reputation as well. The influencer marketing strategy is to form relationships with influential people and big companies. Thereby you can invite them to share your content, website and promote your brand. Online influencers help SEO by being reputation drivers. They drive traffic to your site, hikes the overall mention of your brand online, all of which counts as authority for your brand.

12 Watch out for Unnatural Links

Backlinks are important to sustain your site’s ranking position. But off-page SEO does come with a price. There is no doubt that links can significantly affect search performance. But they can be positive or negative. But you don’t want to get into Google’s penalty at all since recovering from a penalty can be very difficult. Google used to be all about backlinks from high PR sites but not any more.

This is because many people have been sneakily placing link all over the internet but, the page doesn’t have much of traffic from users. So now Google is looking for more user optimisation on websites. It prefers sites that match user intent and have valuable content. The focus now is on the ‘purpose for using that particular phrase’ when people search rather than the actual ‘search phrases people use’. Therefore it is a more intuitive search. This is where mobile-friendliness, user-friendly layout, helpful content and genuine blogs prosper.

Conclusion

Off-page SEO is as important as on-page SEO. For successful SEO, you have to employ both SEO techniques. When link building, don’t take the easy way, but try to get links from hard-to-get and reputed pages. The more difficult it is to get a link, the more valuable it is.

Until recently, you could easily get a number of links and easily rank higher. Nowadays, you have to do better. What you have to do is, focus on link building after you make a great website. Do good promotion for it, get a couple of links from good places and everything will fall into place.

For a website to have a great online presence, get ranked at the top and to earn conversions from it, performing SEO is not an option but a necessity. Both on-page and off-page SEO have their own advantages and it is crucial that you do search engine optimisation on your webpage. It is only then can you expect to top search result ranking and maintain the position. Hope you enjoyed our off page SEO tutorial. If you have queries or concerns about your website, please get in touch with us at Brandloom.com. Good day!

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