When you are buying a new product online, or be it watching a series on Netflix you always look for the reviews/ratings and go for the one with the highest ratings.
Off-Page SEO also works in the same way. Here the search engines look for the backlinks as the ratings and will consider these backlinks as a prominent ranking factor.
Off Page Optimization.
First, let us understand what is Off-Page SEO and How is it different from On-Page SEO.
Off-page SEO is an activity that is done outside the website to increase its authority and rank higher in the search engine result pages. With off Page SEO, you are trying to prove to your readers and search engines that your site is trustworthy, authentic, relevant, and authoritative.
While On-Page SEO includes optimizing everything on the website. It includes optimized titles, friendly URLs, easy navigation, header tags, internal links, page loading speed, mobile-friendliness, image optimization, alt tags, external links, and most importantly high-quality content.
You cannot rank on search engines if you ignore either of these techniques. Both On-Page and Off-Page SEO are important practices to keep your website in the competition of ranking higher on search engines.
Benefits of Off-Page SEO
Increase in rankings
Increase in page rank
More traffic
More Visibility
For Off-page SEO you need to focus on Link Building and branding as an integral part of off-page SEO strategy.
Link Building
’Backlinks’
Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to the pages on your own website.
Link building plays an important role in improving your website domain authority. It is important to get backlinks from websites that are relevant to your niche and have brand Positioning. having backlinks from such websites will indicate to search engines about the website's content relevancy and authority.
If you want backlinks to Boost Your site ranking you need to aim for high-quality links from authority sites.
There are two types of links that can help you boost your off-page SEO performance.
Do Follow And No Follow Links
Do follow links are the links that pass on the authority to the linked website. And No follow links are the links that do not pass on the authority to the linked website.
No-follow links are hyperlinked with rel=”nofollow” tag.
The difference between the two links is apparent when you check the HTML code
Example of Do-Follow link
<ahref= “https://ahrefs.com>anchortext</a>
<ahref= “https://ahrefs.com><”rel=nofollow">anchortext</a>
No- follow links do not impact the search engine rankings of the destination Url as google does not crawl these links.
It is crucial to know when to use Do follow and No follow links. If a website has only do-follow links, Google might consider this to be fishy and might impose a penalty on your website.
Keep a mix of Do follow and No follow links to make these links look natural. Natural backlinks profiles are diverse. Nofollow links act as a catalyst for followed links.
What is ANCHOR TEXT?
Anchor text Is the text that wraps around the link. This text gives search engines such as google the sense of your internal link and gives them more context.
Anchor text helps both users and search engines decide whether a link is worth visiting or not.
Types of Anchor Text.
Exact Match - Ex: Search Engine Optimization
Phrase Match - Ex: What is Search Engine Optimization
Brand - Ex: Search Engine Journal
Naked Url - benefits-of-seo-for-business
Generic - Ex: Get organic traffic for your website
LSI Keyword - Ex: Keyword research for Search Engine Optimization
You can get backlinks by using two methods. These methods are so far the best Off-page SEO strategy to get backlinks.
Natural links
Manual Links
Natural links
These are the links you get to having high-quality content. Google considers these links to be more authoritative as these links are not tweaked to increase SEO performance.
You will get natural links when you have written an in-depth, researched article which will help the link juices to flow when linked. Just like the research papers. Your research paper gets a mention if a fellow researcher finds it to be useful and informative.
In the same manner, your article will get a link if it has problem-solving, informative content.
These Natural links showcase great trust, endorsement, and appreciation. While these links are not easier to earn, you can go ahead and try to get links manually.
Manual Links
These are the links built or created with an intention to promote or market your business.
The Effective ways to get Backlinks are
Brand Mentions
Broken Link Building
Guest Posting
Social Media Engagement
Forums and Questions
Brand Mention
When one website mentions another website it is considered a Brand Mention. These brand mentions are not the links that will take the user to the homepage, these links are considered Implied Links. As mentioned in the Patent Panda by google, google considers these implied links authoritative as they are coming from the brand.
Brand mentions can be a shout-out for your business or your website mentioned in the blog post.
Guest Posting
It is an excellent way to connect with a new audience and grow your personal brand. You need to submit the content to other blogs in your niche and in return, you will get a backlink from those blogs which will help you advertise your business in an informative way.
Broken Link Building
Broken links are a big no in terms of user experience. When you come across such links you may notify the author about the broken link, the author will replace it with another active link and in favor, the author might give you a backlink. ( This may not happen every time but you have a chance to try getting backlinks).
Social Media Engagement
A good social media strategy can build brand awareness for your website. We are living in an era of social life. It is important to have your website presence across all social media platforms and keep engaging with your audiences to build social proof.
This will help you build authority in your niche, and other brands will approach you for brand collaboration, link exchange, and guest posting. This will be a win-win situation for both businesses.
Forums and Questions.
This is another great way of getting backlinks. You can answer user questions from your niche on the platforms like quora, Reddit, etc and add your blog links as references to answer those questions.
These links will drive referral traffic.
Your backlink profile shows what kind of links point to your website.
A good backlink profile must have
Backlinks from unique root domain
Are relevant to your website
A healthy balance between so follow and No-follow
High authority
Anchor text diversity.
I hope you have a got in the sense of how to optimize your website for Off-Page SEO and get backlinks.
Do let me know in the comments if you have any questions on SEO.