Off-Page SEO: A Beginner’s Guide

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a pretty well-known and admired field in this era. By this era, I mean, where the traditional means of doing businesses, and other activities have transposed into digital means. There are almost a total number of 2 billion websites, accessed through different search engines. These are not just 2 billion websites but billions of digital businesses like online stores, consultancy, and so on. 

Even though that whenever someone asks a question or query on search engines like Google, Firefox, internet explorer, and many more, there comes a list of many websites as a result that can answer our query. However, there may be many websites that can answer our question but why the search engine has chosen some websites to rank first or show us on the top than other websites that can also be used to answer our question. This is where search engine optimization plays its role. 

In Easy Words, SEO is the method of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. There are three types of Search Engine Optimization: 

• On-page

• Technical

• Off-page

On-page SEO :

On-page SEO is ranking your website higher through both the content and the Html source code of your website. Technical SEO is a technique of optimizing your website for the crawling.

Technical SEO:

With technical SEO, you can help search engines access, crawl, interpret, and index your website without any problems.

Off-Page SEO :

Off-page SEO is all the measures that are taken outside the actual website to improve your rankings. We will be discussing off-page SEO in detail later.

Ethical Or White Hat SEO: 

SEO can be ethical and unethical. Ethical SEO is known as White-Hat, which includes all the activities that are allowed by search engines and law to optimize your website, like improving the speed of your website and having a good interface or preview.

Unethical Or Black Hat SEO:  

Black-Hat is using illegal and unethical means to rank your websites higher, which are stopped by search engines. The activities included in Black-Hat are like breaking algorithms, and so on. Then comes a hybrid model of both Black-Hat and White-Hat, which is known as Grey-Hat SEO. 

Importance of SEO:

Before moving on to the discussion of what is off-page SEO and techniques that can be used to improve it, we have to understand the importance of SEO:

• SEO helps websites to get more traffic from multiple sources and loyal visitors who often visit your site. 
• SEO helps get more traffic on your website through a regular update on the content of the website. 
• With an increase in traffic, e-commerce websites can earn more revenue. One can monitor the rank of his or her website to know its status. 
• Searching for keywords to get traffic is part of SEO, which is useful to get articles or text submission automatically. 
• SEO helps in building and maintaining trust and credibility by establishing a strong foundation for a beautiful website with clean and effective user experience. 
• Better user experience can be created through effective SEO
  

OFF Page SEO Technique:

There are many other benefits of SEO that add more to its importance; however, now I’ll be concentrating more on Off-page SEO and the techniques that can be used to improve it. As I mentioned before, off-page SEO includes activities done outside a website to optimizing it to improve the website’s ranking. Techniques that can be used for off-page optimization includes:

• Backlinks: One should always focus on writing shareable content that is extraordinary and of very good quality. Your content must appeal to people and force them to use your content and website link on their site that will automatically generate more and more natural backlinks. You must research more often to write fresh, updated, and interesting content. 
• Influencers: If you are sure that the content you are writing is worth sharing and is something of great quality, and even then you are not getting the traffic you were expecting. You can use influencers in your industry to check out the content like blogs on your website and ask or link backs from their blog. Make sure you get the links from completely relevant domains.
• Guest Authors: Some websites and blogs allow authors to write or add to their blogs. You can write quality content on such blogs for the creation of more links. Try to write once on such blogs as writing multiples times on a single blog have the same impact as writing multiple times on the blog. 
• Social Media Engagement: Primarily, social media engagement contributes to off-page SEO. There is an estimate that 3.8 billion people are users of social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, and many more. Having such a number of users equals almost half of the world’s population. You can win links and traffic for your website by utilizing social media platforms. Social platforms are the best playground for brand advocacy and promo. Three strategies can be used to win more traffic through social media:
  • Be responsive 
  • Befriend the Big Brothers 
  • Monitor your online reputation 
• Social Bookmarking Sites: Social bookmarking sites are sites on which internet users can share their blog posts, images, videos, articles, and web pages. These sites can be utilized to promote your website by bookmarking your webpage or blog on a famous social bookmarking site to gain high traffic. Some of the famous social bookmarking sites are Dig, Slashdot, Reddit, Diigo, Tumblr, and so on. 
• Question and Answer: One of the ways to gain more PR and traffic is from question and answer websites. You need to search for questions related to your field, and then you can answer the question, provide a link to your website, which can help in bringing you more visibility. Some of the famous question and answer websites include Quora, Answer. Yahoo, Ehow, Answerbag, and Blurtit. 
• Image and Video Submission: You can share your websites’’ images and videos on famous image and video submission sites to earn more traffic. You have to make sure before submission that you have optimized your image or video with the correct URL and total bag. Check for proper caption, description, and tags before submitting your image or video. Some of the famous video submission sites are Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Vine, and Metacafe. Some of the famous image sharing sites are Mediafire, Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, and Imgur.