Today, search engines are intelligent enough to figure out if the links are natural or have been created by some manipulative means. It is necessary that your website is linked to relevant websites. This is extremely important because search engines like Google consider a quality website to be one which is popular and has a lot of quality links pointing back to it. Your website will be rewarded by the search engines and rank higher for this. A website with a lot of quality backlinks will always outrank a website with fewer or no backlinks. This is why off-page is so important. It is more time-consuming than on-page and is a continuous process. In the future, this quote will not be an exaggeration.
Importance of Off-Page SEO
For any online marketing strategy, a fundamental understanding of how SEO functions is of high importance. Off-page SEO service is no different. As much as it is critical to know what to do, it is just as critical to know what to avoid. Understanding the importance of off-page SEO will lead to more focus on the process as a whole. This is what will help differentiate from those who merely know SEO, to those that truly understand it. Off-page SEO also generates traffic, as it is known that higher traffic leads to higher income. The highest traffic generating technique is search engine optimization, and that is almost always done off-page. The most widely known benefit of off-page SEO is its ability to boost rankings within search engine results. This is, in fact, the main reason for people to even attempt anything to do with off-page SEO. If done correctly, this can be a very effective way of high rankings within search engines and more traffic. Higher rankings will result in everyone seeking for that thing associated with your website to click on yours first. This can be merchandise or even just information. Higher rankings can earn your site more credibility and if the product sells itself, it will result in repeat business.
Benefits of Off-Page SEO
The benefit of any SEO action would be to increase the ranking of your website in the search engine results, and that is exactly what off-page SEO does. The effect of off-page SEO is long-lasting compared to on-page SEO. I’ll give an example why, let’s say you find information on a topic on a website and it’s quite good, and the same topic information is found in a newspaper. Which one will you give the credit to?… to the newspaper, because you believe that what is published in the newspaper has more credit. This is exactly what happens with off-page SEO, it gives more credit to your website, which results in a high ranking. Increase in PageRank – PageRank is a number from 0 to 10, which is given by Google to a website. It measures the importance of a website. If you are serious about your business, it is very important to have a good PageRank, and off-page SEO would help you to obtain this. More exposure – Higher rankings also result in greater exposure because when a website ranks in the top positions, it gets more links, more visitors, and ultimately more return on investment.
Social Media Marketing
Social media is one of the most effective ways to promote your online content. But it’s not enough to just share your content on social media; you need to actively participate in the community, and the best way to do that is by engaging with influencers. Influencers are individuals who have established credibility and an audience, and can be a powerful ally to help promote your content. Social media is a two-way street, and providing value to influencers is the key to getting them to provide value to you. Start by helping them with their goals; leave thoughtful comments on their posts, share their content with your audience, or engage in some friendly social banter. Once you have built rapport, you can start providing them with value specific to your goals. You can ask them to contribute to your content by providing a quote or a guest post, or share your content with their audience. The goal here is to get them to become personally invested in your website and content, as this will make the most impact in getting them to help promote it.
Creating Engaging Social Media Profiles
Finally, we have the bio/information. You want to provide just enough information to where the viewer knows a little bit about you, but doesn’t get bored reading. At the same time, you want to include all business-related information such as contact info, location, and what your company is about. Bios are the first step to drawing consumers/connections in and giving a little tag of what’s to come. A well put-together profile picture, cover photo, and enough information in the bio is what will make a consumer follow and visit your page again.
For example, we’ll take a business in the fashion industry. If said business uses simple selfies and low-quality images as their profile picture, a potential consumer is less likely to follow. First impressions are key, and if a profile picture is what will give a first impression, why not make it a good one? Using a high-quality, professional picture will give off the impression to the viewer that you are a professional and credible source. A cover/header photo is also very important as it’s the first thing people will notice when viewing your profile. Using this as a marketing tool to showcase your brand or what your company is about is very effective. It goes the same for individuals and company/start-ups. People want to see a nice picture of you and whether you’re showcasing your brand, product, or yourself, the cover photo is a good place to showcase what you’re about.
On social media networks, like it or not, it’s all about the profile. The bio, pics, and updates all need to work together for an impressive and engaging visual design. What you put in your profile can often be the determining factor if a potential follower will follow you or not. For businesses, creating a professional but appealing profile is crucial. Using professional pictures, showcasing your brand, and allowing enough information for consumers to know about you are steps that must be taken when creating profiles.
Sharing High-Quality Content on Social Media
Share high-quality content on social media. Sharing your content on social media is a great way to get it in front of new eyeballs and expand your audience. If you have a presence on social media, you should make it a point to share your content. This is one of the most powerful ways to get your content out into the world. Social media is a great way for people to discover new content. This is largely because social media is a place where people go to discover new things. Think about your own habits. You might check your Twitter feed to see what’s happening. You might check Facebook to see if there are any interesting notifications. You might go to Google+ to see what people are talking about in your circles. Content discovery is an activity that people all over the world are doing every single day. Make their content discovery experience a great one by sharing your content. Now, when you are sharing your content on social media, you need to keep one thing in mind. You need to share your content more than once. There are two simple reasons for this. First, you have to realize that all of your followers are on social media at different times. If you only share your content once, you are probably only going to reach a small fraction of your followers. The other reason is due to the nature of social media. On any given day, a person might only check his Twitter feed for a few minutes. He is probably going to miss most of the content that scrolls by in his absence. This is why you see the same companies and brands sharing content multiple times on social media. It is very effective, and it doesn’t take much additional effort.
Building Relationships with Influencers
Building relationships with the top influencers in your niche is one of the most effective ways to jumpstart your website’s reputation. The strategy is simple: leverage the audience of an influencer to gain exposure and direct that exposure towards your website. With a warm introduction, the influencer can even place backlinks on his site to yours. With an established relationship, it isn’t uncommon for an influencer to engage with your content on social media. If the influencer is significantly more active on social media than your website, this can lead to a large increase in engagement on the content that they share. This engagement is a signal to search engines that your website’s content is relevant and interesting, so it will bring increased traffic from search engines to your site. A shoutout from an influencer about your latest article can really take your site to the next level. If the influencer’s site links back to your site in the shoutout, this could result in tons of referral traffic. Finally, the more you engage with influencers and the more your brand is exposed to their audience, the more your brand becomes recognized as part of the community in your niche. This familiarity can drive a large amount of direct traffic to your site from the influencer’s audience.
Link Building Strategies
You can also build links by finding relevant websites and convincing them to link to your site. This takes time and patience, but it is time well spent. Start by finding some blogs and websites in your niche. Read their posts and leave insightful comments. This will help you build a relationship with the blogger. Then you can start to email them suggesting that they link to a specific post on your site. If the post is truly helpful, chances are they will link to it.
By participating in online communities and forums, you can become known as an authority in your niche. It’s a great way to build relationships with potential customers and other experts in the field. Your participation will generally be rewarded with a link back to your site. But do make a point to engage intelligently, without spamming.
Guest blogging is a two-way street. In addition to posting content to other blogs, invite people in your niche to blog on your own site. They’re likely to share and link to their guest article, which could bring new readers to your site. Just be sure that you only post high-quality, original content without spammy links, because Google is cracking way down on low-quality guest blogging.
Guest Blogging on Relevant Websites
Once the content is established, the best way to get people to share links to it is to do some manual promotion. This could mean letting people know about it on forums, contacting bloggers in the niche, or using social media to get the word out. The important thing is that you’re not spamming the link; don’t just post it up somewhere with no context expecting people to click it. The goal is to get people genuinely interested in the content, and this requires a personal touch when reaching out to potential linkers.
Today, the single best way to get high-value links to your site is to create high-value content. This step is absolutely crucial to any link building effort; without it, the chance of receiving links that will result in sustained long-term search engine rankings is next to none. High-value content can mean different things depending on the niche of your site. Some sites will benefit from long comprehensive articles, others will need to supplement their text with videos or pictures. Regardless of the form the content takes, the key is that it provides value to the intended audience. It should be something that people look at and think “I’m glad I saw this.”
Many people consider link building the best possible method of off-page SEO. The belief is that if people are linking to your website, they must think highly of your site’s content. This form of thought can be correct; however, not all links are created equal. Search engine algorithms consider the source of the link and the link’s intended purpose when evaluating its value. In order to get the highest possible evaluation of the links to your website, it’s important to employ link building strategies that result in high-value links.
Participating in Online Communities and Forums
Keep in mind making intelligent and useful posts is the most important part of forum posting. Often mods and admins at these forums can delete your post if they suspect you’re just trying to post to get backlinks. Your posts should be relevant to the thread, and also genuinely help the other readers. Do not post things like “yeah I agree” or “LOL that’s awesome!” These can often get deleted, and do not add too much value to the thread. By making good posts, you can still get a fair amount of backlinks from doing very little work. Sometimes, popular threads will end up ranking in search engines, and links from the threads to your website can bring you a great deal of traffic. This traffic will often be very targeted, and can lead to high conversion rates. Partnering with a website very similar to yours in topic or niche in a joint effort to run a forum or community can be an excellent way to get high PR backlinks for very little web marketing effort.
Online communities and forums are some of the best ways to get quality links. By making intelligent, useful posts, you can leave in-content links in designated signature areas or in your posts themselves. When search engine spiders crawl these sites and forums, they often follow the links, and so you can get backlinks to your website.
Earning Backlinks from Authority Websites
This is the best way to obtain high quality backlinks. Research the content that is already working well in your niche, and then create something even better. It could be more in depth, more up to date, or simply a different slant on the topic to the content already available. Once created, the most important part is to get it in front of the eyes of the right people. This can be done through outreach to relevant websites/blogs and also social media and forums. Earning backlinks with content can take a lot of time, but the reward is outstanding.
How such backlinks can be acquired varies greatly, and each should be no approach, or a mixture, of the below: – Creating and promoting amazing, relevant content
What makes a backlink high quality is also subjective. At the very minimum, a high quality backlink is an inbound link from an authority website, with a varied anchor text, and is do-follow and cached. The page the backlink comes from must be an update and have a Google Page Rank (PR) of six or more. It must be relevant to your site, and not ‘spammy’. It should be pretty natural.
Creating Shareable Infographics and Visual Content
There is a variety of visual content you can create, it need not always be an infographic. You can even transform your existing articles into other visual content like videos, slideshows, or podcasts. Visual search engine platforms like Pinterest and Image source will enable you to take part in a larger marketing field. This can add more value and attraction to your content making it more link-worthy. In simpler terms, people will like your content better, in addition to being able to understand it.
Creating an infographic that is both relevant and accurate to your industry can effectively market your website. Infographics are an efficient way to gain backlinks since it is easy for readers to share on their blog or social media. From a recent study, it was reported that the span of an infographic is much wider as compared to that of a blog. Infographics that are posted on niche sites often get shared and tweeted about more than other types of content. With the right marketing and creation plan, this can mean more than 300 backlinks for just one infographic.
Online Reputation Management
Online reputation management is the practice of monitoring, addressing, or mitigating search engine result pages or mentions in online media and web sphere content. In the age of online reviews, the decision to consume a product or service resorting to the customer is always heavily influenced by what the web is saying about a particular brand. It speaks over platforms like blogs, news articles, social media platforms, image or video content. In most cases, it is referred to years after the occurrence of the situation or after a particular product or event has been discontinued. Online reputation management is crucial to safeguard a person’s or brand’s reputation, whether said brand is an individual, company, product, service, or an industry. This is because it takes only one negative post and, as a result, a decrease in viewership or sales of a title. Monitoring and responding to online reviews is a very open tactic to reputation management. Though in most cases, it is a reaction to negative criticism, that does not mean a positive review should be left unnoticed. If a brand is being reviewed on a third-party site, i.e., not in the comments section on its own webpage, then it should always be monitoring these review sites. If the reviews are in a search engine, set a Google Alert to the brand and its products so that any new activity in the search engine database will be emailed as search engine results pages often get forgotten and the customer will not always directly inform the brand of said negative experience. This can be used to monitor any online media as results will often appear the brand was not directly informed.
Monitoring and Responding to Online Reviews
The online reputation of a business has been proven to directly influence sales, revenues, and even business partnerships (Jansen and Martin). Just as in the offline world, a business has to be aware of what the consumers are saying. It’s vital to know who is saying what, where they are saying it, and why they are saying it. Of course, if it’s a positive comment, this would be a great source of feedback and could also be utilized as a testimonial if permission is received. There is no negative with someone saying something nice about your business, unless it is on a less visible area. This would mean writing positive comments or giving thanks to those on the same site or forum. On the other hand, negative comments need rectifying. If it’s one person’s word against your reputation, you can try emailing the person. Ask them kindly why they feel this way and what you can do to change their opinion. Be sure to explain this isn’t a way to hound or hassle, just a friendly talk, and that it’s purely to help you become more aware of people’s feelings and to improve your business. If said person doesn’t wish to participate, don’t push them. You can always give it a week or so and attempt to do this method without mentioning the comment. If there is a group of people all saying the same thing, then it’s time to proactively resolve the issue. This could mean giving away free samples and providing these people with a response. This way, it’ll feel more personal as they have experience with you and you are trying to make things right for them. Always remember that it is never possible to satisfy everyone (complaintsRus), sometimes the best way to move on is to forget, though remember not to make the same mistake twice. With a lot of consumer comments coming through search activity, it is also possible to directly change the suggestions made by Google with a related useful comment. This would be simply done by searching for the products you offer or your business name and posting a comment in the same fashion as SEO. This is a generally good idea if it is easy to generate comments in the targeted area. Often changing a suggestion is not too competitive, so the end result will sway the comments traffic to finding useful information.
Building Positive Brand Mentions and Citations
Finally, donating to charities and sponsoring events will often result in your company being listed on the sponsors’ pages, thus resulting in an inbound link.
You can also build relationships with bloggers and journalists in your industry and offer up your expertise for quotes and interviews. Just be sure that they mention your company. Offering to write testimonials and case studies can also be an effective tactic. Just be sure to request that they include a link to your website.
A well-placed press release can be an extremely powerful tool for online brand promotion. If you currently have something newsworthy occurring at your company or something interesting that you can relate to current events and issues, it is definitely worth your while to take the time to draft up a quality press release and distribute it to media outlets and press release sites on the internet.
Positive brand mentions and inbound citations are strongly correlated with higher rankings. They also make your brand appear more trustworthy and improve its relationship with customers. There are a number of online PR techniques that can be used to improve your brand mentions and inbound citations.
Influencing Search Results with Press Releases
Press release is said to be the write-up or news article shared to the news media as well as to the targeted publications, with the purposes of making the public aware of the news in positive light. Online press releases are very similar except they are shared online. They are an effective and free way to generate an interest in your company and drive traffic to your website. You can distribute the press release through the multitude of online PR sites as well as other online sources. A very important part of the press release is to include a link to your website. As with all off-page SEO techniques, obtaining the inbound links is very important. The more quality inbound links you have to your website, the better your search engine ranking will be. This comes from the page rank system and the fact that Google trusts and places importance on the websites with the high-quality inbound links, deeming them more important and relevant to others. So by sharing your press releases with the online community, you can add a few more quality inbound links to your website and increase your off-page SEO. Also, similar to article submissions, you will want to share your press release with as many people as possible. The more who see it, the better your chance of it being picked up by others and republished. This is based on the idea of link bait. If you can write a good enough press release, it will be republished by others and assist in more inbound links as well as overall visibility of your company.
