Improving the visibility of a website depends on the actions taken inside and outside the site. Applying the most effective off-page SEO techniques will help to gain traffic and relevance from different sources.
Why is off-page SEO important?
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the set of actions that are performed on a website to get organic traffic. It consists of optimizing them so that search engines understand what the website is about and how it works. At the same time, they see what others say about a given website.
The main SEO actions are classified into on-page and off-page. The on-page SEO is the actions that are performed within the website to optimize it. That is to say, it is prepared to appear in search results. Among the most important factors, we include quality content, web usability, good design, fast loading time, and use of keywords and meta tags, among others.
But what is off-page SEO? As opposed to on-page, these are the actions that are carried out outside the web. They are just as important as the ones you do on your site, but it can be more complex to make them work because the webmaster can only control some aspects of them.
Off-page SEO puts the website in front of the audience and tells the search engines what they think about you. It gives you more relevance and increases your authority if there are third parties saying that your site is useful. And in this way, it contributes to climbing search engine rankings.
The fundamental basis of off-page SEO is to get quality inbound links. This is achieved through original, useful, and attractive content; participation in social networks; guest posts; getting mentions, etc. It is also important to engage with others in your industry.
On their own, these actions will not work. You must develop a complete strategy, with on-page SEO actions to achieve your goals.
What are the objectives of off-page SEO?
These actions aim to make you known to the audience. On-page optimization makes your site look good in the eyes of visitors and crawlers. But, what you do outside invites them to go to the site, and make it known.
The objectives of off-page SEO can be summarized as follows:
- Increase visibility on the search engine results page.
- To get backlinks or quality incoming links.
- Improve the reputation and SEO positioning of the website.
- Increase the presence in social channels.
Like everything that has to do with SEO, off-page has also evolved over time. Actions that used to be valid are no longer valid. Therefore, applying them will cause your website to be penalized or, in the worst case, to be de-indexed by the search engine.
Among the SEO practices you should avoid are:
- Hiding links to manipulate the ranking, for example, placing the link in a single letter.
- Cookie stuffing, which consists of placing cookies on site visitors without them noticing.
- Keyword stuffing or keyword over-optimization.
- Buying links on other sites and using so-called link farms.
- Spamming blogs with meaningless comments and links.
- Article rotation, which consists of using old content by changing some parts to reduce similarity.
Most effective off-page SEO techniques
These are the practices that you should follow when considering an off-page SEO strategy.
Getting quality backlinks
When Google or any other search engine detects that there is a link going to your website, it interprets that the content is useful. Therefore it gives more importance to it. But not all backlinks are good. A link from a website that is an authority in your niche is not the same as one that comes from a new site.
So you should try to get links from websites that have authority, that is popular. In addition, they must be relevant; that is to say, they must have to do with your topic. And they must also be trusted sites.
For this, there are two fundamental steps. First, have quality content, without good publications, you will not attract attention or gain the trust of the audience. On the other hand, get in touch with other authors in your niche. Contact them and start expanding your network.
Vary the content formats you have and find the one that works best for your goals. Some tactics you can apply to get quality backlinks are:
- Create infographics, podcasts, reviews, etc.
- Participate in social networks.
- Create guest posts.
- Find broken links on other sites and propose to change them for one of yours.
- Comment on blogs and relevant sites.
Types of inbound links
To better understand how links work, it is necessary to know what are the types of inbound links.
According to their origin, they can be natural or artificial:
- Natural links are those that are obtained when another website has the initiative to create a link to your site. You don’t have to ask for it, quality content does its job.
- Artificial links are those that you build. For example, placing the link in forums, and blog comments, among others.
Another classification includes do-follow and no follow links. Dofollow links are those that transfer part of the authority and page rank of the site they link to the destination page. Nofollow links do not transfer them.