Off-Page SEO Techniques to Start Incorporating Into Your 2016 Strategy
When optimizing websites companies spend tremendous amounts of time on the design and structure of various web pages. Even the best-optimized website can have trouble making it onto the first page of the Google search engine results page. To get placed in the top 10 spots you need to focus on off-page as well as on-page SEO techniques to maximize your website’s exposure to internet crawlers. On-page SEO is only half of the job when working on your website. Off-page tactics make up the rest of the work that will greatly help you raise your domain authority and gain an advantage over your competitors. Off page SEO techniques are comprised of all link building and SEO strategies that do not take place directly on your website. This requires a more creative strategy but when done correctly can show huge results.
While there are countless methods of off-page SEO the majority of them involve techniques focused on social media, blogging, and link building.
Social Media
Social media, especially for newer companies and ecommerce stores, is a great place to start when beginning to work on your off-page SEO. Likes and followers on sites like Facebook, for example, give brand’s credibility and search engine bots crawl through these networks and take this data into account when it ranks websites. The number one way to use social media to help your website’s SEO is to post regularly unique and relevant content that fosters engagement with online viewers. Use this content to strategically place keywords, backlinks, and hashtags that are relevant to your business. Moreover, social media websites contain “About” sections that let you describe your company that you can use for additional link building and keyword placement.
Blogging Strategies
Creating a company blog and updating it regularly is a vital part of creating an off-page SEO strategy. Aside from the SEO advantage of creating a blog they are also a resource that can lead to an increase in conversions. According to hubspot, B2B marketers that use blogs receive 67% more leads than those that do not. Furthermore, blogs are proven to increase visits to your website, and get more pages indexed by search engines.
Having a regularly updated blog can increase engagement with customers who may share blog posts with friends across social media. Increased engagement and additional shares on social media platforms assist websites by giving credibility to your website domain. Moreover, blog posts are great opportunities to place anchor texts that link to pages on your main website. Having regularly updated blog posts also causes search engine bots to crawl your website more often because they have to evaluate updates each time you add new content.
Another off-page SEO strategy under the topic of blogging is to find and engage with separate blogs than your own. These other blogs must be relevant to products or services that your company delivers. You can utilize the comment sections under blog posts to leave links to your website and start conversations that will engage readers who may be interested in what your company has to offer. Forums are also a great place to post relevant and engaging content that links back to your website.
When you create quality blog content, you may want to share it with influential thought leaders within your niche who maintain a high domain authority. If you get your company’s content featured on websites with a high domain authority, it will greatly improve your credibility with search engines that will positively effect your ranking in SERPs.
Link Building
Off-page link building has strong ties with SEO blogging strategies. Link Building is a very important factor for bettering your website’s SEO. The more relevant links you have pointing to your website the better. The number of inbound links essentially determines the credibility that others give your website. The more inbound links, the more credible and trustworthy your site must be. Furthermore, Google places higher value on external links to your website than internal links. You want these external backlinks placed on websites that are similar to yours regarding the information presented, or the niche market that is targeted. Link building strategies often require building relationships with relevant people and websites to share backlinks in an organic manner. Because of this technique, these strategies are also known as relationship based link building strategies.
When deciding who you want to build relationships with in hopes of exchanging links, you want to take into account that websites with higher domain authorities will provide better results than those with low domain authorities. When building relationships figure out how you can provide value to your new contact, and what value you want to get in return. Usually, this would determine the content or guest blogging you want to create.
An example of a successful way to create a link building relationship would be for an e-commerce store who sells surf gear and wetsuits to reach out to a local blogger who writes about all things surfing. The blogger would be considered an influencer in the surf industry and can produce content that will reach a large number of readers. The surf company could persuade the blogger to review one of their products and post about it on the blog. This would provide brand awareness for a large number of people in the same industry niche, and anchor texts could be used to link back to the brand’s main website. In return, the blogger can get exposure on the company website that would improve the blogger’s reputation and maybe even increase their number of followers.
Next time you conduct an SEO audit of your website make sure you take into account the importance of off-page SEO. Brainstorm with your content creators and your PR team so you can create a plan of action to create quality content, build valuable relationships, and engage with fans on social media.
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