SEO 101: What Is Off Page SEO?
You know the importance of SEO. From quality content to meta tags for your pages, you have left no stone unturned to obtain the best possible visibility for your website. Yet, your efforts fail to improve your ranking too much, leaving you wondering: What am I still missing?
Off page SEO.
Strange as it may sound, the ranking of your website is decided not only by what you do on your page but also off it.
But what constitutes off-page SEO. How can you take advantage of it to improve your site’s visibility? Let’s find out.
An Introduction to off-page SEO
SEO is ultimately about increasing the reputation of your website. On the page, it is achieved by quality content and a proper layout that is more accessible to a web crawler.
But the content on your website is not the only metric that a search engine like Google uses to rank you. It is also about how your website is perceived by others.
Be it other websites, user’s clicking habits, search engines pay attention to each and every ranking factor to determine the trustworthiness of your website. The more other people talk about you and your content, the more relevant Google deems you and higher you are ranked.
Off-page SEO is thus about building the authority of your website instead of simply optimizing the content you have.
Link Building
At its core, off-page SEO is all about link building. This is because links are the most easily accessible metric that Google has to determine the value of your content.
Think about it. A search engine cannot employ millions of people to physically go through each and every new piece of content on the internet in order to determine how useful it is. Even if they do, such evaluations are likely to be highly subjective and hence useless.
So what Google does is to give a website ‘points’ for every link pointing their way. Whenever another webpage (or even a comment) backlinks to your content, Google’s algorithms increment the value of your site a little. It is important to note that getting the wrong links for your website can have adverse effects on your website ranking. You should consult with a web page optimization SEO expert if you don’t have enough experience in the use of links. Apart from being taught on how to use the links for optimal results, you will also get advice to various market places that sell links at affordable prices.
The effect will be even more pronounced if the links originate from a site with an already good rank, as Google deems such a referral to be more valuable than a backlink from a random comment which you might have paid for.
Guest Blogging
But how on earth do you get other websites with a well-known presence that links back to you? Simple. You write a blog on their site.
Publishing a blog on another website is a tried and tested way of improving your offsite SEO. Many reputed blogs are always on the lookout for guest posts from experts, and will happily host a post that matches their overall theme.
Not only do these guest posts allow you to discreetly link back to your own website, increasing your standing in search engine results, but it also helps you establish your website as an authority in your field.
Social Media
Any SEO campaign in this day and age is incomplete without incorporating social media. With thousands of highly shared posts being put out daily on popular social networking channels, you would be remiss not to take advantage of it.
Off site SEO through social media is not just about linking to your website (though that is an important part). It is also useful in popularizing your brand. The goal is to spark natural conversations around your brand, which would automatically cause Google’s algorithms to classify your website as more relevant.
For at the end of the day, your website is meant for people, not machines, and organic word-of-the-mouth marketing is still the best way to catch attention.
What can be described as Off-Page SEO?
Off-page SEO also known as SEO off page can be regarded as any efforts that you can put to drive more users to your website. They are techniques that you use to attract people to visit your websites. They are ways that will get people to know about your website and any content within them in the first place.
For instance, you can employ the use of working with content that can be shared with many people on the internet. What happens here is that you are trying to get people to know about your websites before they get to know what type of products and services that you deal with. There are many off-page SEO techniques, some of which will be described below.
What is the difference between on-page and off-page SEO?
On-page SEO refers to efforts that you apply to your website which are designed to improve your sales. They are all those things that you do to get and maintain a huge following using your website. Such techniques include the quality of the blogs, service pages and media that you upload on your website in terms of website content. These should always be designed properly so that your website can rank well.
Off-page SEO techniques, on the other hand, are used to refer to the efforts that you apply on the sides; those that are not uploaded on your business website. They are what will make your website popular on the internet to those that have not visited your website before, and they will be pushed to visit it eventually.
Some of the most commonly used off-site SEO technique is guest blogging which should attract traffic to your website.
You can improve the performance of your off-page SEO techniques using factors such as the use of backlinks. You need to have a good number of links that direct users to your website.
Some of the techniques that are being used by website developers that can be referred to as off-page Search Engine Optimization techniques include;
- Engagement in social media platforms
- Media submissions
- Sharing documents
On-page SEO Techniques
On-page Search Engine Techniques are used to refer to what is done to directly affect the performance of the website. The techniques here include the use of relevant keywords and media that will enable your website rank amongst the top ones in the results of search engines.
The on-page search engine optimization techniques are included in the design of websites so that you can boost the performance of your website. You should optimize your websites using a variety of SEO techniques to get significant organic traffic for your websites.
For you to the best results, you should come up with a well-structured SEO strategy. Make sure your research on various ranking factors that will help in improving the ranking of your site. It is advisable that you hire a copywriter that will come up with great content for the topic and anchor text of your website. Once that is done you can now paste it on your site and share your content on various platforms.
These are the techniques applied to provide your website with a one-of-a-kind user experience. They are applied directly on the content that is uploaded on the websites of businesses so that search engines can give you the best rank in their results whenever a search is made in them.