What are the best techniques for off-page SEO

Off page SEO is nothing but improving your website positions in Search Engine Results Page (SERP). It tells Google what others think about your site. Based on the links that you have on your site, search engine assumes that you have great content.Let’s dive into the details for more info on off page search engine optimization.

• Get Authority Backlinks

You know, without backlinks, it’s impossible to rank on first page search results.

Backlinks are the most important off-page SEO factor when it comes to content marketers and bloggers. Because search engines trust your website more if your site has any authoritative relevant backlinks.

When Google looks for fresh content, it indexes your new pages and makes it available for search users. When relevant search queries are triggered, Google uses some algorithm facts to determine whose pages will rank. This we call as Google ranking factors in SEO terminology.

Here are the most important factors that Google considers while ranking:

• The number of linking domains. The number of domains linking to your site is one of the most important ranking factors
• Page rank of a linking page. The links from the high page rank website is considered more than the links from low PR pages. Yes, try to get links from high PR pages.
• The number of linking page. It is always recommended to have more links from individual domains rather than from a single domain.
• Authority of linking domain. A link from low pagerank page on a high pagerank site is better than from a low pagerank one.
• Count number of dofollow links. As Google officially stated that it won’t count nofollow links while ranking, it considers dofollow links.
• Contextual links. The links within the content of the page are worth more than the links in a sidebar.
• Links from homepage. The links from a homepage of a linking domain carry more strength than those on one of its pages.
• Link relevancy. The links from pages related to your pages topic carry more relevancy for search engines.

Google views your website as more valuable than others if you have many backlinks from authoritative websites. Google analyzes the questions about links like, where does the link comes from?, quality of the link, how fresh the link is? Etc..

How to get those authoritative links?

#1. Guest blogging: No doubt, guest blogging takes you so far and helps a lot in acquiring great links The only challenging task here is, you need to do a lot of research about the topic. After that, you need to find out the top blogs in your niche and submit your pitch. If they accept and yes your article gets published.

#2. Broken link building: To earn the links, this method is pretty much faster than guest blogging. Do you know, lots of links on some authority blogs are actually dead. If hosting expires, during file transfer or migration of the sites, links are bound to break.

The one good point is broken pages don’t affect your site’s ranking. But it does give bad experience to user. If your customer service is bad, then 85% of your business could be lost according to the Sacramento Design Network.

So, conduct a backlink analysis on your niche websites. Find broken links, contact the owner and let them know about their dead links. There are chances that they will do a return favour by including your link on their website or you can offer replacement link too.

#3. Create compelling infographics: It always gives impressive results provided they are created with great information. If you have budget to afford, you can use Canva for professional infographic designers.

If you want to attract huge number of audience and acquire authoritative back links, then infographics works the best. Because, the ideal customers respond to visual content better than the plain text.

Infographics goes viral if you give sufficient promotion to it. When people share your infographics, it continuously generates organic traffic to your blog.

• Improve Your Social Media Signals

Social is the NEW SEO. Here’s the image that tells you how social media impacts your SEO.

Know your target audience by engaging more on social media. By contributing regularly to discussions, you will understand where your audience hang out more and at what time.

Because these days people don’t just go to Google for everything. Yes, social media is the new SEO. They use social media channels to look for what they want. So, you also need to consider the search that happens on social media.

If someone wants to know more about your brand, they check your presence on Twitter, Facebook and of course other social media channels. Share your content in the form of content or images or video. Join related groups in Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and share the content there too. It helps in connecting with potential users.

Users go for Quora more to get right answer rather than Google or Bing. Make the best use of it. Post your content in the relevant sections or threads in the Quora. One important note to remember here is, never do any promotion on this platform. Write really useful answers to the questions related to your niche and give your blog link at the end of the answer.

Here are some interesting stats that gives how much people are using social media for searching any query.

In a study conducted by comScore, Twitter handle 19 billion search queries a month as of 2010, Google around 88 billion search queries a month and Bing 4.1 billion search queries per month. In 2012, Facebook mentioned that it’s getting 1 billion search queries per day.

Social media presence helps to grow your business and gets you more backlinks. The web is for building relationships, expressing and sharing ideas, helping each other with useful and helpful information.

• Save Your Site From Google Penalties

If you want to sustain your site’s ranking position, backlinks are really important. But links affect the search performance either in the better way or makes worse.

Backlinks have the strongest impact on search engines. It is very important to save your site from Google penalties because recovering from penalties is very difficult. Google mainly focusses on user optimization and valuable content.

How to stay away from Google penalty radar?

Perform full backlink analysis and it helps to analyze which links are good and which are bad. Here is how you can ensure that your site is free from getting penalized.

1. Perform site audit: You can use tools like SEMrush for finding and fixing website SEO related issues. You can find out all the reasons why your site is not ranking well on Google. That being said, I’ve written an in-depth tutorial on how to conduct an SEO audit using SEMrush.

2. Optimize your content: Content is the king always. You may not use right keywords but if it looks too promotional then nothing can stop it from going viral. Help your audience by creating useful and helpful content. Use visuals in your post, integrate data into your blog posts. Your audience tries to know more about you if you really give them valuable content.

3. Use different keyword phrases: Once you are done with full backlink analysis and understands from where links are coming, focus on using different keyword phrases, generic content and brand names in your content so that Google considers your links as natural. Which means your links shouldn’t have exact match keywords in their anchor texts.

One tip is to use your brand name as anchor text because anyone can share your content and link to it. You can’t control your anchor texts so use your brand name. Make sure you always publish fresh content to enhance your brand in the online world.

• Contribute To Other Sites

In the world of SEO, guest blogging is very common.

What you get by contributing to other sites?

• It helps to build your authority.
• It can bring you lot of referral traffic.
• It helps in building links.

While writing guest posts for other sites, don’t link too much to your site. It spoils your relationship with the site owner. Even if you are writing guest post for others, give really awesome content. Low quality guest posting brings extra trouble to you.

Here are the few things you need to keep in mind before you guest post on other sites:

• Collect list of all sites related to your niche that accepts guest posts.
• Set up an excel sheet and write each site’s home page domain authority (DA), guest posting guidelines etc.
• To get more guest posting opportunities related to your niche, type in google with these search strings. “Your seed Keyword” + “guest post” or “intitle: guest post guidelines”.

• Search on all social media platforms. For example, head over to Twitter page and in search box, you can give “your keyword” + “guest post”. Seriously, it shows you more opportunities than Google search engine.
• So, you have list of all sites that accepts guest posts. Now, it’s time to know which of these sites bring you more traffic. Go to similarweb.com, and enter the domain of that site where you want to write guest post. This site gives you general idea about site’s popularity.
• To check more about your guest posting site, observe their blog comments on posts. It gives you information whether site is active or not, up-to-date with current information.
• Go to blog social analyzer, and submit the RSS feed of the site you want to guest post. This is to know the number of social shares that site’s recent posts have. If they have more tweets or shares, there are good chances that your post also will have.
• Now, it’s time to write an amazing guest post. If you have a topic in your mind, linktally.comwill tell you how well the post is going to perform.
• Another way to determine topic for your guest post is to check which pages has more backlinks. For this, go to open site explorer, and enter the site’s URL. Click on “Top pages” tab and check what pages have high Page Authority (PA).

Submit To Directories And Forums

Off page SEO helps you to make your website more popular on the Internet. To get more visibility, submit your stuff to directories and forums. Here are the sites where you can submit your blog content to enhance more visibility.

• Social bookmarking sites: These are the best platforms to promote your stuff. When you post on popular social bookmarking sites, it helps in gaining more traffic to your blog.
• Submit to forums: Make sure that you participate in each forum related to your niche and build connections with community. Make the best use of do-follow forums.
• Blog directory submission: It helps to build quality backlinks. It takes time to get better results but it definitely helps in long run. Select a proper category under each directory and start submitting your posts.
• Article submission sites: It is always good to submit the articles to high page rank directories. If you submit low quality content and has more keyword stuffing, then your article gets rejected. So, create highly unique content.
• Question and answer sites: You will get good amount of high traffic from question and answer websites. Join those sites and search for questions related to your niche, give helpful answer to any question. Don’t forget to give your blog link at the end of the answer. You can use the sites like Yahoo answers, Quora, blurtit etc.

• Share your videos to these sites: If you are a vblogger or any other, submit to these sites to make your videos popular. It is one of the ways to get quality backlinks.
• Image submission sites: Make sure you optimize your images with the correct URL, title tag before submitting to these sites.
• Submit your infographics: Make really impressive infographics and submit to these sites. Give reference link to your website.
• Share to document sites: Create documents related to your niche.Make sure you create unique and helpful pdf or ppt.

All the sites mentioned here have high Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA). No doubt, off-page SEO gives better ranking to your website in Google search.