How Should I implement Off-Page SEO? Guide and best practices for Beginners.
Implementation of Off-Page (Off-Site) SEO
What is Off-Page SEO?
Off-Page SEO or Off-Site SEO is optimisation activities you carry out outside your website (web pages), this is one of the ranking factors considered by Google, it helps in ranking your website on top in SERP.
Off-page SEO refers to anything done outside of your website with the potential to affect search engine rankings. Optimizing your site for off-page SEO means you’ll have to improve the way that both users and search engines see your site in terms of credibility, authority, popularity and relevance.
Off-Page mainly deals with building credibility to your website from an external website or other websites which has higher Authority (Pages & Domain). Other websites pointing and recommending your website in form of links (Backlinks).
Why Off-Page SEO Matters?
Google uses over two hundred factors for ranking sites. It’s difficult to rank based on content alone; this is where off-page SEO comes in. By telling Google what others think about you and your site, you are helping it determine how much your content is relevant for users. This is why getting links from quality websites is key.
3 (Three) key factors that determine the value that a backlink contributes to your site
1) the recognized quality and authority of the linking site,
2) whether the linking site encodes the link with “do follow” status
3) the link’s location on the website.
In short, links from respected websites, set to “do follow” status, and posted within the site’s main body content will deliver the greatest value from an SEO perspective.
How do you implement Off-Page SEO?
The best practice to get quality backlinks is to write top quality content or blogs (skyscrapers) which resolve or gives solutions to the users search intent/problem.
When you do this, you will get a large amount of traffic to your website or webpage, automatically you will start getting good backlinks from other websites which have high values.
We will also discuss few other means of getting quality backlinks.
Links you earn from other websites such as CNN, BBC, Wikipedia, Higher Education University of Research (Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, CIT, MIT), Government Portals to name a few are highly recommended.
Firstly, let us understand some of the terminologies used in Off-page SEO.
Page Authority (PA) – Page Authority is a score developed by Moz that predicts how well a specific page will rank on search engine result pages (SERP). Page Authority scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.
Domain Authority (DA) – The domain authority of a website describes its relevance for a specific subject area or industry. Domain Authority is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz. This relevance has a direct impact on its ranking by search engines, trying to assess domain authority through automated analytic algorithms
Anchor text – Anchor text is text on a page with a clickable hyperlink attached to it. You’ll want to use anchor text when linking to another source whether that be another URL, a PDF document, or any other online media. Keyword-rich anchor text refers to links containing your target keywords within the link text – as opposed to links that say “click here”, “link”, the domain name, the website name, and so on.
Link Volume – The number of links on a page.A total number of backlinks your website has.
Link authority – Link authority is an indicator of the ranking power a link carries over. Trustworthiness of the site which is linking to your website.
Link Placement – The links which are placed on your website and where it is placed within your content so that the Link juice (weightage of the link) is distributed.
Link Juice – Link juice is slang used to describe and measure how much power a backlink passes onto another site and therefore strengthens it.
Internal and external link juice
- External link juice is the linking power that is passed on from another domain.
- Internal link juice is the linking power that is passed on by internal linking to other internal subpages.
PageRank – a value assigned to a web page as a measure of its popularity or importance, used to determine the order in which search engine results are presented.
You read more on PageRank here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
So with these in mind, the Off-Page SEO has to be implemented.
How to Get Backlinks?
10 Top methods you can put to use.
- Turn Brand Mentions Into Quality Backlinks
- Use Outbound Links to Form Partnerships
- Find Backlink Opportunities with Top Referral Sources
- Spy on Your Competitors
- Build Links From Outdated Resources or Broken Links
- Use Google Search Console Reports to Get Backlinks
- Spy on Your Competitors
- Use Content Formats Proven To Generate Links
- Create High-Quality Content That’s Link-Worthy
- Publish a Skyscraper Content.
Keep Reading.
E-A-T: an acronym for Expertise, Authoritative, and Trustworthiness. Is an important factor. Sites that do not have these qualities tend to be considered of lower quality by Search Engines, whereas the ones which matches EAT are of high quality.
There was a time when Google Toolbar use to show the page rank of any web page, as people started misusing this feature they stopped it.
When you start getting backlinks, google normally transfers one-third the value of it to your website or page which is linking. So the EAT of that website that is pointing a link to your website is an important factor.
Things to avoid.
There are certain things to avoid as per Google Webmaster Guidelines and in 2012 Google came out with an algorithm called Penguin Update to handle the Blackhat practices of webspam. Penalising those who practised it.
- Link purchase, link exchange: Unnatural as there is no link recommendation by a user
- Link/anchor text: Unnatural accumulation of linked keywords (money keywords)
- Rapidly growing link profile: Unnatural link growth on sites that only received minimal links and suddenly show an increased link growth
- Topic relevance: Links from topically irrelevant sites (e.g. a link on the topic of “car insurance” is considered unnatural on a website with the topic of “children’s fashion”)
- Negative link environment: e.g. links on the topic of betting, poker etc.
- Inferior backlinks: Links from punished domains and link farms, footer links, comment spam, blog spam etc.
You should also know what are DoFollow and NoFollow Backlinks
Dofollow Links: A dofollow link is a link that helps in terms of SEO by passing on the authority of the origin site to the destination site. This passing of authority is called, “link juice.” Acquiring dofollow backlinks will help improve a website’s domain authority, or domain rating, which in turn, helps to improve keyword ranking.
By default, links are dofollow.
Nofollow Links: A nofollow link, or backlink, is a link that does not pass authority on to the website it is linking to. These links do not help in terms of SEO.
To make a link nofollow, add rel=”nofollow” to the code when linking to a website.
What is DISAVOW Tool?
Google’s disavow tool allows webmasters to notify Google of poor-quality links pointing to their website that they do not want to be associated with their site.
10 Types of backlinks that will boost your Off-Page SEO
1. Acknowledgement Backlinks
Sites often publish acknowledgements when a brand makes a donation or has a representative speaking at or sponsoring an industry event, etc.
2. Free Tool Backlinks
Offering a valuable tool – for free – is another strong method of earning both attention and backlinks that have a deep and long-lasting impact on SEO. This can mean creating a simple but useful asset, such as a cost calculator valuable to those in your industry, or providing a lite version of a paid tool you offer. To encourage backlinks, promote the tool with sites that have a similar audience to your own, as well as your guest blogging site targets.
3. Relationship-based Backlinks
When they prefer referring you while writing the content and links to some valuable source, then that’s known as relationship-based link building. If you reach out to the website you refer to as a source, you can easily turn editorial links into relationship-based links.
4. Guest Blogging Backlinks
If a site that accepts guest blogging doesn’t allow backlinks within the content, it usually will do so within the author’s bio. Even when outside of editorial content, these backlinks still have a positive impact.
5. Backlinks in Business Profiles
Creating digital profiles for your brand on business listing sites, social media, industry directories, and review sites most often comes with the opportunity to post a backlink (or a few). Search engines view these entries as evidence that a site is well established.
6. Editorial Backlinks
Editorial mentions that refer to your site – and include a link placed within relevant, high-quality content – make for the ideal backlink. Commonly, editorial backlinks are created when your content is cited as the source of specific information (such as an article or infographic), when a company representative is quoted or interviewed, or when your site is included in a link roundup on a particular topic.
To attract editorial backlinks, create evergreen content that demonstrates your status as a thought leader, such that your site and your brand earn acclaim as a go-to resource for interviews and industry insight. Create engaging, shareable content that can go viral.
7. Comment Backlinks
Posting genuine and relevant commentary on content – and including a backlink – is usually acceptable if it adds value to the conversation. However, if executed in a spammy manner, this technique can end up hurting your reputation with search engines. Be careful not to overdo it.
8. Backlinks from Webinars
Webinars (and recordings of them) offer particularly valuable content for sites to link to. Sites will often embed webinars in their pages along with a link and mention of your brand as well. Use tactics similar to blog promotion to achieve these backlinks: sites you target for guest blogging may also want to add your webinar as a resource.
9. Badge Backlinks
One clever technique for establishing backlinks is to come up with a badge to award to other brands as recognition for their status or achievement in some capacity. When those sites proudly post the badge on their sites, you get a link back to your own.
10. Press Release Backlinks
When your brand has a newsworthy announcement to make, putting out a press release can serve as a foundation for your PR and marketing tactics, while also producing backlinks from publications that cover the announcement and the published release itself.
10 Backlink Analysis Tools that will help you.
You don’t have to master the use of these tools but knowledge of the same will help in using the right tool to achieve your analysis.
- Ahrefs
- Ubersuggest
- cognitiveSEO
- Linkody
- Kerboo
- Majestic SEO
- SEO PowerSuite
- Link Research Tools
- Open Site Explorer
- Monitor Backlinks
BONUS: How do I get a backlink from Wikipedia?
A Backlink from Wikipedia is loved by Google, they are considered genuine and trustworthy. It will also drive highly relevant traffic to your website. Once you have a link on the Wikipedia page remember other websites will also often reference your website too. This in turn generates high-quality backlinks organically.
Now let us check out how you can do it.
If a link is broken on Wikipedia, it is broken for all of the sites that link to it as well, so from one broken link, you can potentially find thousands of backlink opportunities.
To identify broken links, use this Google search query:
site:wikipedia.org “Keyword phrase” “dead link”
It will return a bunch of results that somewhere have “dead link” in their Wikipedia page for that keyword phrase. Check out each of them on the SERP.
There you get it.
This is the perfect opportunity. EUREKA!
But does this mean you should just point every broken link to your website? No. All content changes are monitored on Wikipedia and need to be approved. So spend the time doing your Wikipedia civic duty and fix some broken links by pointing them to the updated page that they’re supposed to link to, or another quality, trustworthy reference.
When the time comes that you have the perfect, unique content to link to, you then have the opportunity to add your backlink as a genuine reference!
