In this article, I’ll discuss off-page SEO. It refers to SEO efforts made outside of your website and includes activities like link building, social media posts, directory listings, Google My Business, forums, article submissions, guest posting, influencer outreach campaigns, Q&A websites, podcast and video mentions, etc. The aim of off-page SEO is to signal Google that you’re a trusted source of information or an authority in your field, thus boosting your rankings on the search engine.
Guest posting
Guest posting on relevant websites can help establish relationships with other websites in your niche and create an opportunity for both sites to share each other’s audience. The main objective is to gain a backlink to your site, which is considered the most ideal type of backlink by Google. For example, a plumbing company posting a guest post on a plumbing website would carry more weight with Google than posting on a tools supplier company’s website.
Guest posting
Guest posting on relevant websites can help establish relationships with other websites in your niche and create an opportunity for both sites to share each other’s audience. The main objective is to gain a backlink to your site, which is considered the most ideal type of backlink by Google. For example, a plumbing company posting a guest post on a plumbing website would carry more weight with Google than posting on a tools supplier company’s website.
Directory listings
Directory listings, such as Yellow Pages or the Counselling Directory, serve as a useful resource and can also offer a backlink opportunity. These sites have been around for a long time and often charge companies to be listed, making them a valuable source of SEO juice.
Directory listings
Directory listings, such as Yellow Pages or the Counselling Directory, serve as a useful resource and can also offer a backlink opportunity. These sites have been around for a long time and often charge companies to be listed, making them a valuable source of SEO juice.
Press releases
Press releases are similar to articles, but they target journalists, news organizations, and the press. The best way to get a press release out is through a press release submission site, which syndicates the information to hundreds of major media agencies. If your story gets enough traction, it could lead to backlinks from news media websites, newspapers, and social media sites. A well-received story can result in thousands of backlinks as others write about the original article and backlink to your site.
Press releases
Press releases are similar to articles, but they target journalists, news organizations, and the press. The best way to get a press release out is through a press release submission site, which syndicates the information to hundreds of major media agencies. If your story gets enough traction, it could lead to backlinks from news media websites, newspapers, and social media sites. A well-received story can result in thousands of backlinks as others write about the original article and backlink to your site.
Forum backlinks
Forum backlinks are similar to guest posts in that you find niche forums that are relevant to your niche and start posting on the forum. While you can just sign up and start posting links to your website, this is most likely going to get your profile that you just signed up with banned within seconds of posting backlinks to your site. Some of the forum websites that offer forum do-follow backlinks will have bots that monitor new profile sign-ups, that then just start posting backlinks straight away. When they find this activity your post will be taken down, worse you can get your profile deleted, with no warning.
In order to stay in good standing with forum websites, you need to:
Let your account age for 2 weeks to a month before you start posting backlinks.
Have healthy conversations with people in the forum.
Once you start backlinking to your site, you need to make sure what you are backlinking to is of some value to the forum.
If you’re a plumber and you’re on a plumbing forum website, then posting guides on how to do a specific part of your work might work, and will stay on the site, without getting flagged by someone on the site, outside of any bots monitoring the site for spammy behaviour.
Google is fully aware of this practice but finds it difficult to police. Recently I’ve heard that Google will only give value to a link made by a profile if the profile still has interactions on the forum. So this backlinking practice might need work over time.
Brand mentions / niche edits for SEO
Brand mentions for SEO is again very similar to guest posts and shoutouts. You pay or offer value to a website just to mention your website / company name in the article, just for the article. These are often called niche edits, as sometimes when an existing article has already been written, asking the author to mention your business for the backlink is a common practice.
Q&A Websites
I’m sure we’ve all used one of these sites over the years to ask a question or 2. So how do you use a site like this for backlinking? The way you use websites like this is to:
- Setup profile A
- Leave about a month, then setup profile B
- Once you have these 2 setup leave it another month
- Sign into Profile A, and ask your niche related question: such as how do “I get a cheap plumber ?”
- Profile B then signs in a month later and replies with, “oh I found www.sitename.com very good, they were xy and z, did a good job”
This is a quick guide on how we do it, but this is pretty much all you need to do. Here are a few of the websites where you can do this.
www.quora.com
www.answers.com
answers.yahoo.com
www.rediff.com/qna
stackexchange.com
ask.metafilter.com
www.answerbag.com
www.girlsaskguys.com
www.blurtit.com
www.askmehelpdesk.com
www.mathoverflow.net
www.theanswerbank.co.uk
www.funadvice.com
www.fluther.com
www.askdeb.com
Q&A Websites
I’m sure we’ve all used one of these sites over the years to ask a question or 2. So how do you use a site like this for backlinking? The way you use websites like this is to:
- Setup profile A
- Leave about a month, then setup profile B
- Once you have these 2 setup leave it another month
- Sign into Profile A, and ask your niche related question: such as how do “I get a cheap plumber ?”
- Profile B then signs in a month later and replies with, “oh I found www.sitename.com very good, they were xy and z, did a good job”
This is a quick guide on how we do it, but this is pretty much all you need to do. Here are a few of the websites where you can do this.
www.quora.com
www.answers.com
answers.yahoo.com
www.rediff.com/qna
stackexchange.com
ask.metafilter.com
www.answerbag.com
www.girlsaskguys.com
www.blurtit.com
www.askmehelpdesk.com
www.mathoverflow.net
www.theanswerbank.co.uk
www.funadvice.com
www.fluther.com
www.askdeb.com
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is an SEO strategy where a 3rd party will provide traffic, leads etc to promote a website. You can find affiliate’s through website such as:
So for example say you’re selling a product, an affiliate marketer can sell these books on your behalf. Great right, well not really they take a big cut, north of 50%. This doesn’t include the fee that the affiliate website you found them on will take. You could always work with an affiliate marketer outside of the website and save money sure, but this is risky. Using the affiliate marketer through a site like www.clickbank.com gives you a little more protection if things go south. There are more risks involved such as the affiliate breaking the rules, selling the product on another site they have no permission for, this now becomes hard to work out who is downloading the product and re-selling it, but this problem also exists in a regular arrangement outside of using an affiliate, anyone could just take your product and sell it on line if they wanted to.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is an SEO strategy where a 3rd party will provide traffic, leads etc to promote a website. You can find affiliate’s through website such as:
So for example say you’re selling a product, an affiliate marketer can sell these books on your behalf. Great right, well not really they take a big cut, north of 50%. This doesn’t include the fee that the affiliate website you found them on will take. You could always work with an affiliate marketer outside of the website and save money sure, but this is risky. Using the affiliate marketer through a site like www.clickbank.com gives you a little more protection if things go south. There are more risks involved such as the affiliate breaking the rules, selling the product on another site they have no permission for, this now becomes hard to work out who is downloading the product and re-selling it, but this problem also exists in a regular arrangement outside of using an affiliate, anyone could just take your product and sell it on line if they wanted to.
Blog and influencer commenting
Although I have written about this else on Bell Clarke, I’ll just write a little about this topic here. Blog and influencer commenting is where you run a marketing campaign that contacts influencers. You then have an exchange of value which will most likely be money. The influencer will then use social media, youtube videos, email and any other way to get your message out there. Traffic is a part of the Google algorithm, the more traffic Google can see coming to your site the more likely it is to push you higher in Google rankings.
Podcast and audio content optimization
Podcast and audio content optimisation is another Off-page SEO technique that leverages the growing interest in audio content. Creating and optimizing audio content means you can attract new listeners, you can engage more with your target audience, and ultimately drive traffic to your site, and appear higher Google search results.
Like all written, and video content it goes without saying that, finding content that speaks to your audience is super important.
When optimizing your audio podcast content, make sure you include your keyword on the title, the meta description, the description, the tags if they have any, and don’t forget the all important call to action at the end of your content.
Competitor backlink analysis
Backlinks are the stable of any SEO campaign that has success, by doing market research into how your competitors acquire their backlinks its vital before you start your own off page SEO efforts. When you study your competitors backlink profile, you’ll find opportunities that you may not have come with your self. Every SEO agency has a different approach to their backlink building and thus you can learn so much from this kind of market research.
Here is what you can find out when looking at your competitor’s backlinks
High performing content: What content is working for your competitors?
New links to build: Find new websites that could link back to your site. This would involve contacting the companies you like the look of, and requesting your do content together so that a link sharing opportunity arises
Competitive intelligence: SEO and the digital landscape is constantly changing, back links that worked 10 years ago may not be so valuable today, keeping an eye on trends in your marketing research helps you stay ahead of what is to come.