Off Page SEO

Off Page SEO

Off-page SEO is taking your site to the wild, to one another’s territory, and see how it fares.

You do your job, and then let the audience cast their vote. The more approvals you receive, the better. These votes are valuable because they send a message to Google that your site is genuine and trustworthy.

Here are three ways you can have links point back to your site:

  • Creating link bait content

  • Linkbuilding

  • Social bookmarking

Now, let’s discuss them one by one.

Creating link bait content

Take a step back and really think if others will care about what you write. To you and your team, your work may be awesome. But would it be as appealing to people outside of your group looking at it?

Off-page SEO sounds complex. I, myself, still get overwhelmed with it at times. But thing is, there is a simpler way to doing this right. That is, creating quality content and everything else should follow after that.

So review your writeups every time to check whether they manifest these three qualities:

  • Usefulness to your target audience (Will readers share or like your post?)

  • Relevance to your business (Does it help you with your business goals?)

  • Beautiful presentation (Is the lay-out pleasing to the eyes?)

After asking yourself these questions, find out if you’re tapping the right sites to get your links from.

If you have done your research about people who matter to your business, then you should have, by now, identified places they frequent – organizations they follow, websites that interest them, as well as people who influence them. Then, make those your link targets.

Advanced search queries
What is your business all about?

Say, I own a store that sells cycling accessories – anything that any biker would need for the sport, I offer. With that, I will look for those blogs whose focus is cycling.

You would want to be directed to as many websites that are regularly updated, and not just be limited to another website’s list.

I suggest that you don’t dwell too much on the query, “list of cycling blogs.” Instead, make your search look like these ones:

  • list of cycling blogs

  • list “cycling blogs” inurl:resources

  • list “cycling blogs’ :inurl:links

You can be as playful with your queries to get the results you like. But expect too that bloggers on a diverse niche are likely to ask for something in return for your links. If they don’t, then good for you. If they do, then at least you wouldn’t be surprised anymore.

Link building

This can be tedious when you’re starting as you’d have to establish relationships with people and eventually get them to trust you. I’d like to think of link building as building a positive reputation among your target audience.

Anyone would be reluctant to do business with a person they know not much of. You need to work hard, at least to initiate interactions, to get people to notice you.

Once you’ve already built a name, then you need not push that hard to acquiring links or in the offline world, recommendations. People would bookmark you, wait for your every update and along the way, spread the word about what you’re currently up to.

It is very important for Google that these recommendations come natural. That they come from the audience who believe in you. But, where do you start?

This is where link building comes in.

First question here is, how do you know you’re getting good links. Here are the attributes to check.

  • High PageRank or PR

You can use PageRank.chck.info to determining the authority of a website in a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the highest. Of course, a site as reputable as CNN or New York Times would have higher PR than a normal blog. If you will be able to score a backlink from a site with high PR, then that would be good for you.

  • NoFollow  or DoFollow

You’d want a dofollow link because that means a reputation or link juice of the page will be passed on to you. The nofollow attribute, meanwhile, you can use to protect your site from spammers, which other bloggers out there do too.

It’s hard to get dofollow links though, and it is still heavily discussed until now whether it’s worth building nofollow links. So the safe thing to go is to make a majority of your links dofollow and the rest nofollow.

  • Different anchor texts

Avoid using the same anchor text throughout your site. Plan a set of keywords you want to rank in. Make it a mix of the exact keyword, then phrase match keywords, and the generic ones.

Let’s use cycling as example. With the model I mentioned, I would have about 30% of my backlinks with the exact anchor text that is “cycling,” then another 30% for the matching anchor texts such as “cycling routine” and “cycling tips,” afterward another 30% for the generic words such as “click here” and “read more.”

The remaining 10% I would dedicate to an anchor text like “http://funcycling.com/cycling-accessories.”

Next, to build links, you may use either of the following:

  • Comment link – Leave a comment on blogs and use your keywords in place of your name.

  • Article directories – Submit unique content to article directories to earn links back to your site.

  • Guest posting – Coordinate with the blogger or webmaster and express your interest in writing for them. Be polite!

  • Link exchange – This is similar to guest posting to the extent that it needs the consent of the blog owner. Only that here in link exchange, you will have to return the favor. Win-win situation!

  • Forums – This can be compared to commenting on blogs but here, you are to participate in forums.

See which works best for you.

Social Bookmarking

This is one way you can hit several birds in one stone.

All you need to do is submit links to social bookmarking sites for referencing then visitors shall be the one judge if they would like to bookmark your submission. Among popular social bookmarking sites are Delicious, Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.

This comes free and shouldn’t take much of your time so go ahead and try it.

So there, hope this helps. Please feel free to share your own thoughts about off-page SEO.

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