Off-page SEO
Are you a business owner, blogger, or agency who want there or their clients websites on top of Google? I did it with my first article so you can too. Learn best off-page SEO techniques to rank on 1st page.
By the end of this blog, you will be able to?
- Describe how links influence search rankings
- Explain the three basic principles of link building
- Explain how links from different websites impact search rankings differently
- Explain why links from social media sites generally do not have a direct influence on search ranking
- Avoid using potential deleterious link-building tactics such as buying spammy links
What is Off-page SEO?
So, we already know that on-page optimization refers to changes made to web pages including both content and code.
Unlike on-page, off-page optimization involves techniques used not on the web page but else were to increase ranking and traffic.
These are tactics employed away from your website.
Signals of Popularity
In the blog on on-page optimization, we talked about factors that center on relevancy.
In this blog, we’re going to go in a different direction and we’re going to talk about the signals that focus on popularity.
So, what does popularity mean in this context?
Well, it’s actually quite simple.
Popularity always relates to links to hyperlinks on the web.
Hyperlinks are typically the blue underlined text.
This is formed by attaching an instruction to the words through the code.
If someone clicks on the words, they are taken to the associated page from the instruction.
Hyperlinks point from one web document to another.
This is a pretty simple concept, so I imagine you already know this.
However, it’s the foundation of this section.
What does this mean from an SEO perspective?
Well, it turns out that hyperlinks are a big group of signals.
starting with google, hyperlinks have been the majority of signals that the search engines process when trying to rank a page.
Now, there’s one big problem with this from an SEO perspective.
Links are, historically and today, very difficult to influence because it’s not something you can control on your website.
It takes place on someone else’s website.
It’s other people that are linking to you and this makes it very difficult to influence.
So, it’s a good thing and a bad thing.
It’s a good thing because it turns out to be a great metric for ranking web documents.
It’s a bad thing because it’s hard for us to make an impact on a day-to-day level which if you think about it, is good for the search engine as they don’t want the optimization process to be entirely in the hands of a website owner, marketer, or SEO.
This is what was so revolutionary about Google.
Instead of taking a website and judging it based on what it said about itself.
PageRank used the judgment of other websites to determine the importance, relevance, and influence of pages, all based on external factors, everything outside of the site owner, webmaster, or SEO’s control.
Why links?
Websites that have highly influential reputation are the ones that people link to often and consistently.
That could be because they’re a source of news, information, entertainment, or other valuable content.
So, then a link from an influential website would add credibility to your reputation just like a review from an established reviewer.
We like to say that links are votes but they’re not just votes.
You see, people link to websites because they like them and the content and they want to recommend them to others.
Keep that concept in mind.
You can’t make anyone link to your website.
You have to give them a compelling reason to have them a link to your website- a picture, funny video, infographic, an article, research, webinar, or simply good content.
All of these things attract people to link to your site.
Hands down, the most time-consuming and difficult part of SEO is link building.
Now, there are a lot of reasons for this.
Primarily because it tends to change and the elements that are involved with this.
The bigger takeaway here is that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for link building.
You have to take the context of the business of your website and you have to apply the general principle to that.
We’ll cover the basic principles and they’re going to apply differently to different businesses.
Number one, creating link-worthy content, content that people love.
Second, proactively participating in off-site engagement such as regular marketing and then also utilizing offline relationships.
Create Link-Worthy Content
The tried-and-true method for building links is creating content that people like.
Let me explain it a little bit more.
The currency of the internet, if you will, is the content.
That’s why people go online.
They want to read the newest article, see the news, watch videos, and be entertained.
What is true from the very beginning is true now and I have no doubt it’ll be true going forward.
So, as an SEO or an online marketer in general, you can use this to your advantage, create the content that people want, and also they’ll share it with their friends.
Whether they’re going to want to cite any kind of paper or whatever they’re working on, that’s a tried-and-true way of gaining links.
It’s the power of content.
You can try all these different things out but at the end of the day, what’s important is the content itself.
Off-Site Engagement
If you’re trying to build links to your own website, one of the most effective ways is to engage off your site.
How would you go to someone else’s website?
Well, think about other human beings.
Human beings are much more likely to link and give back to other human beings that they know well.
So, a lot of the time I spend when I’m doing link building is spent on other websites engaging with other people.
Now sometimes this is through social media.
Networks are great ways to find like-minded people and learn about them.
Social networks are great places to research your audience, see what they need, and also see how they talk about their industry.
Look for people there who have similar interests or see what they’ve trying to promote and befriend them.
Now, don’t give a sales pitch, they might never respond to you but have a conversation.
Create relationships with people so that they like, know, and trust you and you’ll benefit from that. I typically spend a lot of time promoting other people and learning from other people to build up a good relationships.
So, when it comes time for them to write an article, they might contact me to see if I’ll link to their article and then the same with them.
Utilize offline relationships to improve off-page SEO
One of the reasons that link building is so hard is because everything moves so fast online, especially with social sharing. So, sometimes one of the more clever and easy ways to avoid this is to go offline.
Utilize some of the relationships that you have of the internet in order to benefit on the internet.
Therefore, this might be some friends that you work with, might be people that you actually know in the real world.
They might be more likely to help you promote new content online.
So, when I’m doing link building one thing I’m focused on is people that I know.
These can be personal friends, other business associates, friendly competition, or just some friends in the space and we like to help each other out.
Types of link for off-page SEO
When link building, It’s very important to understand that not all links are created equally.
A link coming from the homepage of CNN is going to provide, what we call link equity.
Link equity: The value of a link
It’s going to have a lot of popularity metrics tied to it and it’s going to be more valuable to you and help you rank higher.
When a link is coming from the homepage of someone’s blog they just started a month or two ago, that’s not going to be particularly helpful for you.
Therefore, if a link is coming towards you, towards your website, that is an inbound link.
These are the ones that help with the popularity metrics.
Now, there are also outbound links.
These are the links when you’re linking to other people and now there is a big misconception about this.
You would think that you may not want to link to other people but that’s not how the internet works.
When you look at bloggers who do well with SEO but do not know anything about it, they link out naturally, they link out to sources to examples, and they help you find where more in-depth information is, especially if they don’t provide it.
These are the natural patterns that search engines are looking for.
So, there’s no problem linking to other websites as long as it’s linking to websites you trust.
Therefore, there are inbound links and outbound links.
There are links that have a lot of popularity value like an established government website or something popular like CNN and there are also inbound links that are not going to have as much value as well.
Rel =”no-follow” and social media
Now, regardless of where your links are coming from, it’s important to look out for one particular attribute, it’s called Rel equals nofollow.
Rel equals nofollow was a tool that was originally developed to combat comment spam like on blogs.
On blogs, lots of people leave completely irrelevant comments and links back to their own websites. It doesn’t work that well today.
One of the primary reasons it does not work is that the search engines introduce this rel nofollow and what it enabled website owners to say is, here’s a link that’s going from my website
but I don’t trust it and so the rel nofollow does not pass any link value to the linked website.
Now, most links from social sites or a resource site like Wikipedia will have a nofollow attribute on them.
This enables them to focus on their site and their own content without having to become a link resource.
Here’s a great example of why links from social sites may not carry any value but they do have a value for attracting humans, that is, getting the click.
While most social sites use this rel nofollow attribute, which means they don’t trust the link and do not pass any benefit from their website to the destination website.
So, while social media does have many many benefits, SEO and particularly link value from SEO is not one of the direct benefits.
Link building Don’ts (Off-page SEO)
Now, we’ve covered the major parts of link building but now I do want to cover some of the things you shouldn’t do with link building.
If you do these things, you’ll probably be wasting your time and more importantly your money.
When you go to the website and you see lists of links that are repetitive and they look spammy, this is clearly written for a machine, only for search engines.
A lot of times they’ll have names of pharmaceutical drugs or other things on them and a lot of times it’s completely irrelevant to the content.
These are certainly not best practices and they’re not a long-term strategy.
Buying links is a gray to a black area with search engines.
They don’t like it. This is when you purchase text links on another website for the purpose of increasing your link relevance.
This does not cover purchasing an ad on other websites to link to your website.
To protect yourself, if you’re purchasing an ad, it should go through an ad server and be marked as a sponsored or paid ad that will protect you.
Otherwise, purchasing a text link for the purpose of boosting your link value is something the search engines will penalize as it is an attempt to falsify your actual relevance.
The last one is reciprocal links.
Now, this might be a little confusing.
Reciprocal links, as you can imagine, are links that go in a circle.
I link to you, you link to me.
Now, no marketing goes into this and there’s typically no manipulation actually trying to go on but it happens all the time.
Now, don’t go out of your way and be afraid of this.
Typically, one new site will regularly link to another news article and that article might link back to them somewhere else.
It happens naturally but doesn’t stress about it too much.
Google links are not generally as good as one-way links but it happens so often that it’s not really worth a lot of your time or any kind of investment.
So, try to avoid it but at the same time realize that sometimes it will happen naturally.
In my own case, when I write articles, I typically have the same group of friends that will link to those articles and I also link to articles of people that I like, know, and trust and so in that way we’re not linking one to another, we are linking back and forth with typical content and commenting on it.
So, in that way, it’s creating new content from somebody else’s content and it helps build both of us but were not directly linking one to another, I link to you, you link to me, and create a little circle.
Key takeaways
- Hyperlinks act as votes of popularity on the web.
- Three basic principles of link building are creating link-worthy content, engaging proactively off-site, and building offline relationships.
- The value of a backlink (inbound link) depends on the ranking value of the web page containing it.
- The ranking value of a webpage depends on the value of pages that links to it.
- Links from social media are either not followed or inaccessible to the search engines.