What is off-page SEO and how does it work?

Whether you are an expert in SEO or a greenhorn seeking to establish your website online, the truth of the matter is that the success, visibility and ranking of your website boils down to 3 very important elements of SEO: Technical, on-page and off-page. While on-page SEO focuses on the internal settings and how you apply them within your website or blog, off-page SEO on the other hand focuses on the external factors and how they affect your website. The main difference between off-page and on-page SEO is that off-page SEO focuses on certain external activities that essentially go beyond the boundaries of a web page.

Off-page SEO basically works by increasing exposure of a site and subsequently its ranking through social bookmarking, social media and link building. But before we look at how these three factors help in exposure and ranking of your website, let’s take a moment to shed light on why off-page SEO is important and its benefit to millions of website owners out there. From an SEO standpoint, off-page SEO helps search engines understand how the world in general perceives your site. To put it bluntly, a website that is highly rated receives an incredible number of links or references from other websites, large number of mentions on social media and it is likely to be shared widely on the web as well.

So what are the best off-page SEO strategies for your online marketing? How can you effectively make use of off-page strategies to increase your website ranking, exposure and page ranking? We take a look at 3 of the most important off-site SEO strategies.

Social media

Virtually everyone is on social media. With over 1 billion users, social media has become an effective springboard through which you can increase exposure of your site by doing social media marketing. While most of the links you get from social media are “no follow” it doesn’t mean that they don’t bring any value to your website. With the increasing number of social media mentions, configuring your website to be social media friendly can aid to boost exposure and rankings.

Link building

The role of link building is improving the website’s visibility and its subsequent ranking. In fact, link building stands as the single most important off-page SEO strategy available to many website owners. It’s akin to accumulate as many votes as possible with the aim of achieving a competitive edge. In the past years, webmasters built links through the use of various strategies to increase ranking. These were:

1. Comment link
2. Blog directories
3. Forum commenting or signatures
4. Link exchange schemes
5. Shared content directories
6. Article directories

In case you were not attentive, please note that I referenced the above methods in past tense. They are no longer workable strategies and as such you should never use them or else you will risk a penalty from Google rather than an increase in ranking.

The one million dollar question is; if the above link building strategies are no longer legal, then what is a good link? Google has purposed to shift away link building from the aspect of quantity to quality or what they refer to as natural links. In other words, it is no longer important how many links are directed to your site but rather how qualitative the links are. Are the sites directing the links to high authority sites?

Are the links natural? Are they “nofollow” links? For example, a link emanating from an ordinary blog does not carry the same weight as a link emanating from Huffington post. In other words, natural link building is the way to go. Another high ranking website has to find your content informative and interesting enough to link it to his website naturally. Such kind of links carry more weight and without a doubt increase your website rankings.

Social bookmarking

As much as social bookmarking does not carry the importance it used to in the past, it can still be a proper means to get traffic. You can still increase your website rankings by finding sites such as scoop.it, reddit.com and many others to promote your website.

To sum it up, the importance of on-page and off-page SEO cannot be given a wide berth. You need both to increase your site rankings, exposure, visibility and credibility!