Off-Site Optimisation

Your search engine optimisation, or SEO results are influenced by things you do on your site (i.e. on-site optimization or on-page optimization) and things that happen off your site (i.e. offsite optimization or off-page optimization). The latter involves what other sites are saying about yours.

Search engines have been trying for decades to find a way to return the best results to the searcher. Off page SEO gives them a very good indication on how the World (other websites and users) perceive the particular website. A web site that is high quality and useful is more likely to have references (backlinks) from other websites. It is more likely to have brand mentions on social media (Facebook likes, tweets, Pins, etc.) and it is more likely to be bookmarked and shared among communities of like-minded users.

Off page SEO refers to techniques you can use to improve the position of a web site in the search engine results page (SERPs). Many people associate off-page SEO with link building but it is not only that. Three of your best chances off off-site optimization are “backlinks”, social media and brand mentions.

(1) Backlinks 

Encouraging links to your website. Let’s start with backlinks. This is the term for a link from another website to your site. Think of links like votes—if you have a lot of links to your site, it means many different people on the web believe your site has good content. It’s a vote of confidence. Search engines might see these links as a sign that you have a high-quality site, and are perhaps a good option to show searchers.

Engaging with your audience through good content. So, we’ve established that links to your site are important—but how do you get them? The key is to think quality, not quantity. In the past, people creating websites focused on getting large numbers of links to promote their position in search engine results. In some cases, these links were irrelevant to their products and services, or came from low-quality sites (by low quality, we mean websites with minimal content that exist only to link to other sites). Search engines caught onto this and responded by giving less value to sites that tried to manipulate the search results, which resulted in a drop in their search ranking.

(a) Legitimate (Natural) Links

What does this mean for you? Links to your site are great, as long as they are legitimate links from good websites. So how can you get more of these good links? The best way is to create great content on your own site. Then, others may link to you because they think their audience should see your content. You can also encourage others to write about you, and share links to your website. In the SEO industry, this is called content marketing. So what’s good content? If you have a small farm that sells fresh fruit and vegetables, it could be a list of Top 10 Summer Fruits or the 5 Best Dishes with Broccoli. To create good content, you have to understand who your potential customers are, what they are looking for, and how you can provide it.

If you ask Google they will tell you that any links pointing to your website has to be natural links. Natural links are exactly what their name implies. A website owner or blogger likes another website or blog and naturally adds a link to his/her blog.

(b) Unnatural (Artificial) Links

There is another category of links which can be referred to as artificial links and by adopting such techniques you increase the risk of getting a manual or algorithmic penalty by Google, the most popular ways used in the past were:

Blog Directories – something like yellow pages but each entry had a link pointing to a website.

Forum Signatures – Many people were commenting on forums for the sole purpose of getting a link back to their website (they included the links in their signature).

Comment link – The same concept as forum signatures where you would comment on some other website or blog in order to get a link back. Even worse, instead of using your real name you could use keywords so instead of writing ‘comment by Alex Chris’, you wrote ‘comment by SEO Rules’.

Article Directories – By publishing your articles in article directories you could get a link (or 2) back to your website. Some article directories accepted only unique content while other directories accepted anything from spin articles to already published articles.

Shared Content Directories – Websites like ‘hub pages’ allowed you to publish content and in return, you could add a couple of links pointing to your websites.

Link exchange schemes – Instead of trying to publish content you could get in touch with other webmasters and exchange links. In other words, I could link your website from mine and you could do the same.

There are various types of Link Building – Internal Linking – providing one or more links to another web page within our website; External Linking – providing one or more links to another web page which belongs to the different website. 

Links, it is classified into two types such as No-Follow links and Do-Follow links. 

(c) Do-Follow Link

Both Search Engine Bots and human can follow those Do-Follow links. It is a link where there will not be any attribute mentioned like “rel = ” in its html tag. By default, all the hyperlinks will be considered as the do-follow links. Example : <a href=”https://www.infozub.com/”>INFOZUB</a>. 

(d) No-Follow links 

In addition to the above and in order to give webmasters a way to link to a website without passing any ‘link juice’ (for example in the case of ads), search engines introduced what is known as the “nofollow link”. Only Human can follow this No-follow links and Search Engine Bots cannot follow this No-follow Links. But still no- follow links plays a vital role to increase the page rank of the webpage. This is a special tag you can add to a link that tells search engines not to count the particular link as a ‘vote of trust’ to the referenced website. No-Follow Link is also a link but it contains an attribute “rel”. Example:<a href=”https://www.infozub.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Infozub</a> 

As a rule of thumb, you should add the nofollow tag on all your external links (within your pages) that go to websites you cannot trust 100%, to ALL your comment links, to ALL your blogroll links, and to ALL banner ad links. 

(2) Promotion in Social Media 

Promoting your site with social media – is the second way you can optimise off-site. Social media marketing is part of ‘off-site SEO’ and if you think about it, it’s also a form of link building. It should be noted that almost all of the links you get from social media sites are “nofollow”, but this does not mean that they do not have any value. Social Media mentions are gaining ground as ranking factors and proper configuration of social media profiles can also boost SEO. 

Search engines will crawl any page they can access, including social media sites. But, they generally don’t place special significance on your popularity within a social media site. For example, you won’t get more credit for having more “likes” or “followers.” But using social media is still a great way to reach a bigger audience. It promotes your site—and your business—because it helps people discover your content and encourages them to interact with you. 

(3) Brand Mentions 

The third method is Brand Mentions. Google loves brands and prefers to rank branded websites on top of the results. The reason is Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. Brands are more reliable and likely to be trusted by users and this translates to better user experience and happier Google users. The difference between brand mentions, link building, and social media marketing is that brand mentions do not necessarily have a link pointing to your website. It can be mentions of your brand in forums, articles, reviews or social media networks. 

Google crawlers can ‘pick up’ these signals and evaluate them accordingly to create a more accurate picture of how your brand is perceived by other people. As part of your off-page SEO strategy, you should pursue any positive mentions of your website, products or authors and make sure that you respond to negative or misleading comments.

To sum up: off-site optimisation is a valuable way to potentially increase your search engine rankings. The best way to support off-site optimisation is by creating good content that establishes your site as a quality resource, attracting visitors who then share it across social media.

(4) A successful off-site SEO strategy will result in following benefits

(a) Increase in rankings

The website will rank higher in the SERPs and this also means more traffic. Increase in PageRank – Page rank is a number between 0 and 10 which indicates the importance of a website in the eyes of Google. Page rank today is only one out of the 250 ranking factors that Google is using to rank websites. Greater exposure – Higher rankings also mean greater exposure because when a website ranks in the top positions: it gets more links, more visits, and more social media mentions. It’s like a never-ending sequence of events where one thing leads to another and then to another etc.

(b) Establish Trustworthiness

In addition to the above, 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. In simple terms, Google wants to rank websites that demonstrate expertise and authority on a subject and one of the ways to ensure that the websites picked up by the algorithms can be trusted, is through the number the type of incoming links. For example, if you want to be perceived as an expert on a subject, it’s not enough for you to say it but other related websites should agree and this is expressed through links pointing to your website.