Now, it's time to look outside your pages in Off-Page SEO. What can you do to gain more authority in the marketplace and show Google that you are a referral?
Here it is necessary to realize that, unlike on-page SEO, in off-page SEO you do not have full control over the optimization.
The decision to give backlinks to your website and make mentions or direct searches for your brand depends on a third party.
What you can do is increase the chances that this will happen. For this, you can adopt link-building strategies, guest posting, redirecting broken links, among other ways to reinforce the backlinks profile and generate more authority for the page.
What is Off-Page SEO?
Off-page SEO is the set of strategies applied outside your pages to demonstrate your market relevance and thus improve your ranking in search engines.
For Google, it's not just about finding their contents, understanding what they're talking about, and understanding how the pages are structured. In addition, the search engine also wants to know how the site relates to the rest of the web.
If the site receives links and mentions from several pages, and if they are relevant and trustworthy, it will earn more points with Google. After all, people only share and refer to what really has the quality and offers some value to them.
Think, for example, of a page with decorating tips on an architecture firm's website. This page is cited in several blogs about decoration, architecture, and design. Better yet: get links from major magazines in these areas!
The tips from this architecture office seem to be a great reference in the area, right? That's how Google thinks too.
Building this network of links that point to the site — called backlinks — is an action known as link building.
Off-page SEO, however, is not limited to this practice. The strategy encompasses all measures taken outside the site, which means that any relationship building with other sites, even if it does not generate backlinks, is considered valid for optimization.
Do you know why? Google doesn't just consider links to the page as a ranking factor. It also considers website or brand mentions to assess its relevance to the market.
Therefore, an off-page SEO strategy doesn't need to focus only on generating backlinks. A simple mention can also be valuable! However, links carry a higher ranking weight and cannot be left out — and soon you will understand why.
Next, you will learn more about these strategies.
What is Link Building
Links are the foundation of the internet. They are the ones that connect one page to another and allow the user to navigate discovering content.
Like users, robots also traverse this interconnected network to index new content and understand which pages are most important, as one transmits link juice and authority to the other.
That's why link building is so important in off-page SEO.
Link building is the construction of a network of links that direct to your pages (called backlinks ) and strengthen your authority on the web.
According to Google's algorithm, the more quality backlinks the page receives, the more relevant it has in the market.
But realize that quantity and quality must go together. It's no use getting hundreds of backlinks, but only from a single domain, or from dubious sites, or placed out of context.
For a link-building strategy to work, you need to earn quality backlinks.
What are Quality Backlinks
As we've already seen, Google puts in a lot of effort to stop black hat actions.
Link building was once a widely used tool to artificially increase authority, with link farm schemes and “super optimization” of anchor texts, for example.
Quality backlinks, therefore, go against these actions, to show that you have received links on merit and that you relate to trusted sites and references in your market. Quality backlinks, therefore, are those that:
• They come from sites with domain and page authority;
• They come from sites that are trusted by Google;
• They come from many different domains;
• They are naturally placed in the context of the page;
• They use a coherent anchor text;
• They are in a prime position on the page (at the beginning of the text, for example);
• They come from websites related to their area of expertise.
These are the main features you should look for in backlinks when outlining a link-building strategy.
No-Follow links
There is also an important point in the characteristics of backlinks: the difference between do-follow and no-follow links.
By default, all links are “do-follow”. This attribute tells the robot to follow the path the link indicates and pass authority from one page to another.
The “no-follow” attribute prevents the robot from following that path and assigning authority to the linked page.
It is used, for example, in blog comment boxes and social networking links, which are often used to spam and build artificial authority.
This is not to say that no-follow links are expendable in off-page SEO.
As much as they don't directly transmit authority to your pages, they generate traffic and make more people aware of your brand.
Link Building Techniques
So let's see what link-building techniques can you adopt to strengthen your authority in the marketplace? We brought some main ones:
Link Bait
Linkbait is the most natural and efficient strategy.
It's about creating content that is so good that it generates backlinks naturally, without having to prospect or propose partnerships.
For this, you can invest in in-depth content, disseminate exclusive research data, create rich materials, offer your own tools, among other types of content that become highly linkable and shareable assets.
Guest Posts
Guest posting is a strategy of posting posts as a guest on a partner blog. It's usually an exchange: you produce content for the blog's audience and can insert one or more links to your site.
This way, you attract new visitors and even gain more authority if the link is “do-follow”.
But it's important to adopt this strategy sparingly. If Google sees that you gained a lot of links quickly, it can understand how to black hat and punish your pages, ok?
Brand Mention
Brand mentions, even without linking to your site, are already valuable for SEO. Google analyzes this criterion to recognize brands that actually exist and are well known in the market.
However, you can also search for these unlinked mentions and identify opportunities to gain a quality backlink. Just contact the administrator, kindly, and suggest adding the link.
Broken Links
What happens when a website's URL pattern changes or content no longer exists? Several broken links are created on the site.
That is, the user who tries to access that old link doesn't find anything, lands on a 404 Error page, and you lose both the visit and the authority that the link conveyed.
And you can find these links on websites with themes related to yours and present your content as a solution to that link that is broken.
You can find these links on other sites using tools like Screaming Frog and Ahrefs.
Link Building Tools
There are several link-building tools on the market.
Some are paid, some are free; some are specialized, others help with certain actions.
Tools like Majestic, Ahrefs, Moz Link Explorer, and SEMrush offer a complete analysis of a page's backlink profile, from citation volume to anchor text quality.
Some of them have their own indicators that help in this analysis, such as Majestic's Trust Flow and Citation Flow and Moz's Domain Authority and Page Authority.
These tools are paid but offer some free features.
Also, you can work with more specific tools for certain actions. The Google Search Console, for example, should be used to ask Google to reject dubious backlinks.
Already Google Alerts can serve to warn of mentions of your brand that are good opportunities to gain backlinks.
What not to do in Off-page SEO?
Since the launch of PageRank, off-page SEO has been black-hated. While Google is constantly working to end these practices, they continue to exist and seem to bring results. However, soon Google realizes the fraud and lowers (or even eliminates) the site in the ranking.
So, it is worth pointing out the practices that are still applied in off-page SEO, but that today represent only link-building errors.
Buying or Exchanging links schemes
Any kind of buying or exchanging link scheme that tries to manipulate the algorithm is condemned by Google. The search engine can notice when there is an excessive gain in backlinks in a short time and penalizes sites that adopt this type of practice.
Some examples of these schemes are the "link farms" (or link farms), which consist in creating sites just to insert links, and PBN networks (Private Blog Network), which are blogs that exchange links mutually.
You may be in doubt whether guest posts and adverts (sponsored blog posts) are penalized by Google. But that only happens if you adopt these strategies to excess without thinking about the user and thus get the attention of the searcher.
On the other hand, if you post relevant to that site's visitors and put the backlinks in context, the mentions will naturally grow, and Google will realize the value of your content.
Spam in Blog Comments
Commenting on blogs with your website link can be a good idea if you really bring up some valuable information. But, as we said, this link is “ no follow ”, and doesn't pass link juice — it's just about building rapport and generating traffic.
There are still many site administrators who insistently comment on blogs just to insert links there. This has no effect on SEO and further damages your reputation.
Google may also notice this practice and penalize your pages. So don't do that, okay?
Sitewide Decontextualized Links
Sitewide links are those links that are located in the header or footer and therefore appear throughout the site.
Many site administrators believe that, because they are on every page, they would be a way to quickly gain multiple backlinks.
Therefore, they insert several links with keywords in the anchor text, including from partner sites, to improve the ranking of the cited pages.
So, this was an article on Off-page SEO - An Advanced Guide 2021. I hope you found this article helpful, and if you have any doubt then feel free to ask questions in the comment sections below I'll be happy to assist you as soon as possible.
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