Off -page optimization is defined as the process which helps the website/blog to improve its ranking on the search engine results page (SERP). The factors of Off-Page SEO carried outside the boundaries of the web pages or blogs of your own domain. The ranking factors of websites are not directly controlled by the admin publisher. Off-page optimization deals in link building for SEO. Off-page SEO is a long term and time-taking process. It includes acquiring backlinks to your webpage from the better authority sites, Social media and Social bookmarking. Off-page factors work in the background to improve the search rankings in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo. Search engines have been moving on two wheels, On-page and Off-page factors. Even if one collapses, it will lead to failure in proper SEO. Talking about Off-page optimisation, some people want quick results for off-page optimisation, but the results will take longer. To confirm that your website ranks, there should be visibility of the website and so the balance of On-page and Off-page needs to be maintained. Off-page SEO plays an important role in the backend. Without applying off-page factors, surely any kind of website or blog cannot rank. This is due to the major factors such as link building, social media, videos, blogging etc. If any website needs references from a website, it(website) should be socially active and should be shared amongst the communities of their niche. Hence, off-page factors are very needy for any website to rank. Types of Backlinks There are two basic types of backlinks, and one is more valuable than the other. Let’s take a quick look at each one and how they affect your site. No-Follow – A No-Follow tag tells search engines to ignore a link. They don’t pass any value from one site to another. So, typically they don’t help improve your search rank or visibility. Do-Follow – Do-Follow links are the type of backlink that everyone wants. Just keep in mind that the backlinks coming from respected websites hold the most value. This kind of backlink can help improve your SERP rankings. However, there are some do-follow links that are considered being bad or ‘toxic’. These kinds of links come from suspicious sites or are gained by breaking the search engine terms of service. This may cause Google to penalize or even de-index the website. The main factor is, it’s not about the number of backlinks, but rather the quality that makes the difference in ranking. By applying off-page SEO strategies, you can boost the ranking of your wesites, be noticeable and get drive traffic on your webpage. Let’s go through various techniques to optimize your web page. The factors which boost Off-page SEO are as follows: Link Building – It is one of the most famous and common ways of doing off-page optimization. Link building is defined as building external links with your website. The main aim is to get as many links or votes you can to rank higher than your competitors. Majority of owners are looking out for cheat codes that how can they build links to their websites. The more the quality backlinks, the better is the authority. Some of the ways which help in increasing link building are: Blog Directories -These are directories like Justdial blog pages which links the entry back to a website. Forum signatures – By commenting on forums, people were getting a link back to their website as they used to leave links in their signatures. Comment link – Just as in forum signatures, where you leave a link in your signature when you comment on any other’s blog to get a link back, here, instead of writing your name you write keywords in the comment. For example, instead of writing ‘Comment by CP’ you write ‘comment by where to buy T-shirts’ or something of that sort. Article Directories – If you publish your article in the article directories, you will get a backlink to your site. Mainly directories accept only original content, but there can be some directories which accept the relevant article. Page Directories – In shared content directories, websites like HubPages allows you to publish your content and in return, you can add links favoring your website. Social Media – The other way of building links is by engaging your website on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram. It is a great way to attract traffic. The links which you see on social media are generally no-follow links, but this does not indicate that those links do not have any value. Mentioning your brand on social media platforms will drive a hell lot of traffic. Go straight with your strategy and website, you will start ranking. Social Bookmarking – This is another great way of promoting and attracting huge traffic to your website. This can be done by promoting your blogs on famous websites such as Reddit, ScoopIt, Digg,etc. The content is very frequently updated on such sites, which is appreciated by Search engines. Guest Blogging – We know the fact that by curating new, unique, compelling content, building up new links will drive traffic to your website. Blogging is a way to attract traffic with a bare cost. By posting comments on other websites will allow you to add links in the comments section. The links will be crawled by the search engines leading to driving traffic to your website. The benefits of off-page optimization are: Better Rankings – By using the techniques of “off-page” optimization, a successful strategy will help increase your website rankings in the SERPs. This will help you attract more traffic. More Exposure – The best part about SEO is when you start ranking higher on SERPs first page, you get more exposure, i.e. more clicks, more visits, more links and more mentions on social media. This is a chain of events which takes place one after another. Better PageRank – PageRank is a concept introduced by Larry page which talks about the importance of a website in the eyes
Impacts of inbound and outbound links in SEO
Whenever you search something on a search engine, say Google, you will get hundreds of links as a search result. These results are spread across many pages. You can skim through all of these pages to get the information you are looking for OR you can focus on the first page with a limited number of links. Usually, you would get all the necessary information from the links displayed on the 1st page. This means that the 1st page on the search engine result pages (SERPs) have the most relevant information. How does a search engine like Google determine which pages belong to the 1st page of SERP? There are hundreds of factors that determine the positioning of a page. One of the most important criteria is the Domain Authority. What is Domain Authority (DA)? Simply put, Domain Authority is a ranking system developed by Moz that determines the pecking order of pages on SERPs. The scores range from 1-100 with 100 being the score at the higher end of the ranking system. Search engines use DA to validate websites providing comprehensive information on a particular topic. This directly translates into a top-ranking website being an authority giving you all the information you need, right at the top of your SERPs. If your page has a good DA, it will automatically appear at the top of the SERPs, and pages with low DA appear lower. DA is calculated keeping in mind multiple factors; the most important being linking root domains, the total number of links associated with the page and much more. What is considered a ‘good’ Domain Authority? Let’s explain this with the help of a common example. Suppose you have a query and you type it out in Google, chances are that a Wikipedia page of that query will appear at the top. Why Wikipedia? Wikipedia pages have many inbound links, i.e., a direct connection to other Wikipedia pages which can provide additional information related to your query, within the pages of Wikipedia. This means that all the information you need is available on Wikipedia. Also, it has several external links which will lead to other pages that will provide you with related information. Search engines view such pages as the ultimate compilation of all the information that a user may seek. This immensely contributes to the DA of a page, resulting in higher ranking. This means that sites with higher inbound and external links are bound to appear at the top of the SERPs. The contrary of this is new websites or business with fewer inbound and external links, will rank lower on DA and hence, appear at the bottom of the SERPs. An important concept to remember is that Domain Authority is a comparative scale. Your aim should be to rank higher than your competitors rather than having an overall high rank. This means that you should try to create pages that appear as the ultimate authority within your respective topic. This is important because your page with a particular topic appears on SERPs if a user searches Google for that particular topic. That is why, getting a good DA requires one to focus on their field on expertise, having related content in the form of inbound and external links, rather than related to irrelevant information.