Now days we hear the word SEO everywhere. What is SEO? Why is it important?
SEO or search engine optimization refers to optimizing your website in such a way that the traffic quantity and quality increases. The main purpose of the SEO is to attract more users towards the website and in order to do so, when a user makes a Google search related to our website, our website must be displayed in one of the top searches.
There are different parts of SEO and today we’ll learn about off page SEO.
The main objective of google is provide good content to the users. It’s completely user oriented. Google optimizes the searches in such a way that the most popular useful content is shown to the users. So how does it do that? Off page SEO plays an important role in this. Let’s see what it is.
What is off page SEO?
As the name suggests, off page SEO refers to the external ranking factors that affect our website. It is used to increase the page ranking using digital marketing. More than that the distribution of the content and how well does a user respond to it, plays a key role here. Site navigation and content writing play a major role in retaining audience.
One of the most important parts of off page SEO is links. What are links? Inbound links are hyperlinks that point from one website to another. Let’s see how we can use links.
Link building
Link building is taking a series of actions by which the inbound links to our webpage increases. The increase must be in numbers as well as quality. This improves the ranking of our page. But how and more importantly why? As SEO is all about making user experience better by providing the users with useful and relevant information, the number of links pointing to a webpage indicates the popularity of it. When you are travelling and searching for a good place to eat but you don’t know where to go, so you ask people and go to the most recommended place, that is what link building does to webpages. So, the more inbound links the webpage has, the more it is sought out by the audience.
Link building depends on two factors-
- creating links which point to our page
- distribution of the content.
So, what is link creation and how is it done?
Link creation can be done in 4 ways. They are as follows:
- By inserting links in your own website-
Two types of links can be inserted between the content on your website.
- Follow links –
We can insert links that point back to your website, could be the same page of the website or another page. Doing this increases the number of links pointing to your website as well as increase the traffic on the other pages of your website. We can also insert links of other relevant websites that have good SEO rankings so that google can understand the relevance of our content. Links can be written using <a > tag and href attribute.
- No follow links –
No follow links are the links that look exactly like follow links but are ignored by the crawler. They are used to eliminate non relevant links that people leave in the comments sections for self-promotion from our website. This can be done by using rel=”nofollow” attribute in <a> tag.
- Creating Wikipedia pages and registering in directories-
Wikipedia is one of the most influential reading platform for users. It is most relied upon and whenever someone wants to seek a fact, they open Wikipedia. By making a Wikipedia page, backlinks increase, thus increasing content relevance and trust. There are different directories on google for businesses, there you can register your site to. Also, there are different sites like sulekha.com and justdial on which you can register your site in order to increase traffic and popularity by relevance.
- Posting on social media and creating clickable ads-
Social media plays a very important role in digital marketing. By posting website links on social media such as Instagram, Facebook, twitter or creating WhatsApp forwards, the site visits increase, thus increasing the site popularity.
- Anchor text-
These are clickable words that can be inserted between the content which point to another webpage or website. These can affect the ranking in a good way as people are more likely to click on these rather than links.
So, this is how we can create links. There is another way of link building where we don’t have to create the link but other people do that for us. It is known as link bait. Link bait is providing the audience with such an amazing content writing that people and other websites naturally put reference or link to it without us having to ask them.
Link building can also be done by paying people or websites specifically aimed for creating links. But it is not recommended as google can identify this pattern and eliminate the links generated by this means from its ranking consideration. Hence, making the ranking drop.
Though link building is a huge part of off page SEO, there as other factors too that contribute to it. Let’s have a look at them.
Non link related off page SEO
Non link related off page SEO helps to make the brand popular and increase site visits, awareness of our brand as well as engagement.
- Social Media marketing
- Facebook – Create a company page. Follow a huge amount of people starting with the people you know to get a lot of follow backs and then continue to follow relevant and influential people. Put out regular posts and interact with people and stay active to increase engagements.
- Instagram – Follow people and increase engagement on Instagram by doing more activities like liking posts, commenting and interacting with people. Some factors to take care of on Instagram are:
- Video marketing
- Post frequently
- Create promotional content
- Host competitions and quizzes for people
- Linked in – Create a page. Make connections, follow companies and people. Post frequently.
- Twitter – Create twitter handle and tweet inspirational quotes and daily progress that your company makes.
- YouTube – Create promotional videos for your brand.
- Influencer marketing-
This can be done by forming relationships with other influential brands and people and inviting them to promote our brand or content.
The main goal of off page SEO comes down to attract people towards the website and make a trustworthy online presence.
