Off Page SEO Guide
The Off Page SEO Guide to help improve your business search advantage
Off Page Search Engine Optimisation Guide (Off Page SEO)
This Off page SEO guide was written to help you improve your business advantage online. Off Page SEO isn’t the most talked about area of search engine optimisation, but plays an essential role in improving your business website presence, trust and authority online, especially if you want to stay competitive. It is an area that also crosses into the field of digital marketing and encompasses a number of key elements that help your website reach new audiences. We will discuss all of this below including the role of social media.
Off Page SEO - The Concept
Off page SEO refers to off website activity and search information that can impact your business website's competitive visibility. The logic being that the more your website is referred to by other sites, the more trustworthy and high quality your content is considered. Your signals, through Google Business Profile and related social media page activity is also relevant in helping demonstrate to search engines and other hight search engine ranking directories that your enterprise is active.
Off Page SEO Factors
There are several reasons as to why off-page SEO is important.
Ultimately, it will directly impact your Domain Authority (DA) score. The DA score is a search engine ranking score that is associated with forecasting a website's ability on rank well on search engine results pages (SERPs). (Domain Authority is not a Google ranking factor however, so has no actual effect on the SERPs).The score ranges between 1-100, and the higher the number your website scores, the more likely it is for your website to rank.Another key reason to encourage off-page SEO activity is because it physically benefits to your website’s visibility, i.e., each link, or citation your website receives from other sources on the web, acts as an 'endorsement' and helps towards determining your physical 'organic search engine ranking'. Earning a high organic ranking takes time, in some cases six months or more, while the bots build databases of web pages for search engines, search engines look at your site and use algorithms—a combination of rules and signals —to rank it.
Off-page SEO goes much further than link building. While search engine bots may crawl your site in search of how well it should rank in SERPs, they also take into account many ranking factors - here are just a few:
- Content: Are you communicating valuable information to your audience?
- Page speed: Does your site load quickly, or does it take a few seconds?
- Backlinks: Are there other authoritative/credible sites that link to your site?
- Domain authority (DA): How relevant is your site for a specific topic or industry?
- Reviews : How are your products, services and operation externally perceived?
- Social Media / blog activity : Comments, reactions, followers etc can all be taken into account as welll as frequency of posting.
The full scale of search engine algorithms and weighting given on ranking factors are only known by the search engine companies. These do change emphasis and develop frequently - but the principles that never change are that search engines want to see accuracy of information and how ‘active’ a company is online, (citation building) as well as how authority and trustworthiness (reputation management).
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Backlinks, citations and website mentions are a key factor in developing healthy off-page SEO for your business website. The better the link quality (i.e. referring site's DA score) and relevance of link associated with your website, the more this indicates to search engines that your website has quality content. Before considering backlink and citation type, let's consider what makes a link more valuable than another.
Key Factors that Impact Backlink Value
- Authority of the linking site - The most valuable types of backlinks come from websites and directories that are recognised as top authoritative resources
- Do Follow vs. No Follow Status - When a publisher adds a link to their website, they can use HTML code to set the link as either : “Do Follow” or “No Follow.”
Do follow links tell search engines to notice and give SEO value to the links
No follow links tell search engines to ignore the links and give them less SEO value. Because do follow links send better signals to search engines, they are more valuable than no follow links. A 'no follow' backlink can still drive traffic to your website however.
- Location of citation or backlink on website - Websites are set up in sections, and the section in which the link appears can impact its value. The most beneficial links are placed within the main body content of the site. Links may not receive the same value from search engines when they appear in the header, footer, or sidebar of the page. This is an important factor to keep in mind as you seek to build high-quality backlinks. Look to build links that will be included in the main body content of a site.
In the Off Page Seo guide continuation below we'll look at the best types of backlinks and citations, as well as other off page SEO factors to help you achieve an improved business advantage online.
Off Page Search Engine Optimisation Guide. Continued ...
Off Page SEO Guide continued
Off Page SEO, Citations and Backlinks
Whilst no definitive here are some of the best types of citation
- Editorial citations : The best links in SEO come from editorial mention, i.e., when another website refers and links to your website in a piece of quality content. An editorial backlink may be included as citing someone from your business, associated with your website or your web content as a source of information, creation or reference.
- Guest blogging citations : Guest posting or commenting is a good way to acquire valuable backlinks. When you submit a guest post to a website, you’re often allowed to include an editorial backlink within your content. These types of backlinks are a reliable way to build trust and authority through other influential publications.
In some cases, guest blogging sites don’t allow or won’t include a link back to the author’s site within the main body of content. Instead, they allow the author to include a link in the author bio. While not as valuable as a link in the body of the post, bio backlinks can still add value to a website’s link portfolio.
Business profile citations : In most cases, when you create an online profile for a business, such as social media and industry-specific directories you can often create, in some cases, some quite informative profiles, These indicate to search engines that a website business is established and high quality.
Webinar, podcast, media citations: In some instances, your business, services, products or general knowledge may leads to interviews such as webinars, podcasts and other media broadcast recordings being available and linked to online. Other sites frequently link to or even embed other brand’s webinars on their site, leading to both links and brand mentions.
Free tool citations: Offering something valuable or an enticement on your website, such as a download, or free tool (e.g., a basic tool, or scaled down version of a full tool) is a good way to get a backlink if the tools are considered valuable enough, others will link to them in their content. You can also add call-to-actions to sign up for the full product/service which drives acquisition in addition to awareness.
Acknowledgment citation: This is when a website mentions and links to a website in reference to a relationship or sponsorship. These links typically don’t have much content related to the brand or what they do, and instead, are simple mentions that: Indicate that the brand made a donation / Show that someone from the brand is speaking at or sponsoring an event / Include a testimonial for the linking website’s brand .. there's no such thing as bad PR !
Press Release citations - A press release can not only alert media outlets about your news and also help your website gain backlinks - but only if effectively executed properly - Only write and distribute press releases when a brand has something newsworthy or interesting to share. This strategy can gain links on the actual press release post as well as on the stories that media outlets write about it
Bad Types of Backlinks ...
Because high quality backlinks are such an important part of SEO, it’s understandable that you may think that every link, no matter how valuable, is beneficial. But not all links are. Some links have little to no value, while others can actually negatively impact SEO such as : Paid Links - Non-Newsworthy Press Releases -General Business and Article Directory Links - Forum Links .... only by using a the services of an agency such as web-aviso can you attain the right balance and acquire the right type or top-tier citation that will be the most beneficial to your SEO.
As social media inadvertently has an effect on your website’s visibility, it is considered another important factor of off-page SEO. From simply creating a social media profile to using it for marketing and advertising purposes, each practice provides evidence that your business is active and can provide extra links for certain pages you want to encourages audiences to visit. So how does social media help ?
- Business profile : creating a page on a social media platform, can act similarly to a listings page as it holds valuable business contact, address and often products and service details that can be important for potential customers. Search engines can use this information to compare for consistency with other listings of yours, so ensure that your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) is consistent - as this is essential for the trustworthy and authoritative aspects of SEO.
- Social engagement: Using social media to help market your business can also impact on your SEO. The links you use on your posts to promote your products/services/events etc, or the social media ads you might pay for that also linkback to what you’re marketing, helps increase the visibility of your business - so each link has an influence on your business’ search engine optimisation. If these posts/sponsored posts are of quality and people really engage with them, the more likely those people are going to like and link to it, which not only helps your ranking, but potentially increases word of mouth and more targeted website visitors.
- Building your audience: Users quickly establish and develop followings on what they like on social media, so with the ease of social sharing, it’s likely that you can appeal to a wider audience, and whilst you may want to focus locally, that doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t use social media to encourage visitors from your local village, town or city to purchase from you. This wider reach is likely to result in more website visitors (as long as your posts are engaging), and that in itself will help your business improve its online search ranking.
- Branded search: Social platforms are ideal for showing off brands, and they particularly work well for retailers, restaurants, hotels and spas. If searchers also use a keyword after they type in your brand name, and that keyword is relevant to your business, you may also find you rank higher for that keyword. .
It’s important to not view social media listing pages as a source of links to your website, because they won’t carry as much weighting in terms of authoritativeness compared with a more credible site that offers plenty of trustworthy information. Instead, it’s more recommended to view them as a place to encourage website traffic and trust.
Overall local businesses need to preserve a consistent identity across each of their listings profiles. This includes ensuring your name, address and phone details (NAP details) are up-to-date and match across each of your chosen directories. As with social media, only choose the right directories for your business, and ensure they’re credible and are visited by your target audience. Contact web-aviso to discuss your aims today.
- Editorial citations : The best links in SEO come from editorial mention, i.e., when another website refers and links to your website in a piece of quality content. An editorial backlink may be included as citing someone from your business, associated with your website or your web content as a source of information, creation or reference.
