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It is not a secret that the field of SEO or search engine optimization is growing every single day with tons of new innovations and inventions. People may not even be aware that their learning of yesterday is going to be out of date when tomorrow comes. Unless you update your knowledge by reading SEO articles and news, there is no doubt that you will fall far behind in the cut-throat SEO race, no matter whether we're talking about on-page SEO or the best off-page SEO techniques. Indeed, there are so many SEO strategies and techniques available.
Two Aspects of SEO
As far as SEO is concerned, there are two primary things that you have to understand. These are off-page and on-page SEO. A lot of people usually focus on off page without really working on on-page efforts, which only result in poor results. But, it doesn’t necessarily mean that off page is not as equally important as your on page strategies. The truth is that content right of the page could actually be more than enough to make your website shoot to the top of search engine results page provided that you do it with exceptional synchronicity and proper care.
Having quality content on your website with on-page optimization is crucial to start. Then, applying the best off-page SEO techniques to boost your overall SEO is key.
Whether you work on off-page SEO, on-page or both, it's important that you define a budget you want to allocate for your SEO campaigns.
What is Off Page SEO?
When you speak of off page SEO, this pertains to the process in which a professional will work on SEO strategies which are not in any way associated or related with the website. To build backlinks, the key is to have a quality content marketing strategy in place. No quality content = No quality links. Off page pertains to everything that you can do while you are outside your site for you to boost the search engine rankings of your website. It is where you will build links that point to your website and will be of great help for your site’s rankings in search engines. You can consider this process as a means to acquire more votes to boost your site rankings.
SEO should not be a stand-alone strategy that you apply to your business but rather a component of the marketing strategy you defined. Indeed, SEO should be part of an overall inbound marketing strategy and be complemented with social media marketing, content marketing tactics and more.
The only problem with most people is that they assume that they can already improve their search ranks by just building links which point to their site. In reality, there is no need for you to build thousands of links for your rank to improve. At the end of the day, it will be greatly dependent on where your links come from as well as the quality of content found on your site.
There are even instances when you can get better rankings even if you only implement either off-page or on-page SEO. Simultaneous implementation of the two methods will boost your chances, particularly when you do the two methods the right and proper way.
You should never create thousands of links at once. It is important to keep in mind that off page SEO is something that you should do little by little. It is an ideal way to implement your off page SEO efforts and will guarantee that this will give you the best results. Quality is going to play a crucial role if you want to increase your site rankings and you have to give strict attention when you implement this method. It is also a wise decision to hire a professional who will help you get better results to increase your search rankings and give a better online exposure for your business.
SEO professionals often suggest several techniques you can try when you want to further improve your off page SEO campaigns.
Below are the top 45 best off-page SEO techniques you might want to implement:
1. Guest Blogging
It is among the most powerful ways when you want to promote your website or business online. You can write blog posts for your site or business and create lots of unique and original content. You have to be precise and clear in what you want to convey to your users through your blog entries. It would also be good if you can promote your blog in blog search engines and directories.
Guest blogging (Quality guest blogging) is one of these best off-page SEO techniques that we love. This is very powerful, can bring you traffic, improve your brand and more.
You can promote your site or blog when you post comments in other blogs of the same service which will let the links in comments section which are crawlable by search engines. Blogs of this kind are commonly referred to as do-follow blogs. In case you are not that confident with your writing skills, you can always hire a guest blogger for the blog and request them to write unique and precise content for your blog to earn more credit from the point of view of search engines.
2. Abandoned/Expiring Domains
Finding and taking over abandoned domains is definitely a strategy on the black hat side if you're doing something like a 301 redirect or using its expired content outside of the site.
3. Ask for backlinks
This is a good way to start, especially if you are a beginner in this job. Think about your friends, relatives, colleagues, partners, clients that have a blog or a site. All you have to do is ask for a backlink. Ask for in-content links instead of links in the sidebar or footer.
But be careful and make sure that the backlink comes from a website that is relevant to your niche, otherwise, it will not have too much of an impact and may even be harmful.
4. Give a testimonial
Testimonial link building is a win-win scenario. Many businesses offer you the chance to say a few words about your experience using their products. This is a strategy that we personally love. If you work with any suppliers, clients, companies or anything; ask them if they want a testimonial from you. If yes, send them a nice thank you message, saying how great their service and product is.
On one hand, this is a perfect way for them to build customer trust. On the other hand, it’s a great opportunity for you to get a backlink and potential traffic from that site and it usually has a much higher approval rate than your standard link request e-mails.
5. Turn your mentions into backlinks
This is probably one of the easiest ways to gain some new backlinks. Somebody already wrote something about you. They mentioned your brand or product, but they have not linked to your website. In situations like these, it is usually enough to contact the webmaster and ask him to convert that mention into a backlink.
But, how do you find those mentions?
Not too complicated. You can try the website mention.com/ or you can create a Google alert. Thanks to those 2 websites, you will be able to track where your company is quoted. Contact that website and ask for a backlink.
6. Research competitors
Another tactic that we love. Checking competitor's link profiles. Essentially, you're piggy backing off of their success. While some links are unobtainable (i.e. a random mention in a news post), others can be diamonds in the rough (a high-quality niche directory).
We suggest using SEMRush or Ahrefs to find competitors’ links. Then, you can try to build the same links.
Studying your competition and trying to get the same (or similar backlinks) will largely improve your SEO. This is, in my opinion, one of the best off-page SEO techniques but it's largely underused. Competition analysis in underused in SEO but not only: a lot of companies try to re-invent the wheel when it comes to digital marketing instead of studying their direct and indirect competition.
7. Profile links
An easy one and this is why you should signup to so many platforms. If you sign up to become a member for a site, you'll get a link in your profile: Facebook, Twitter, Quora Google+… So, signup for many platforms today!
You should also be looking for niche relevant profile opportunities.
8. Scoop.it
www.scoop.it/ is an awesome way to drive traffic and to build a few links at the same time. This site is a content curation site; users get to curate what content they want to share.
Check out this website, look for influencers or create your own account and start sharing your content.
9. Get Your Own Wikipedia Page
As opposed to contributing, having a Wikipedia page about you or your company is something to look into if you've already built up authority. If you're well known, this is a great option & a huge way to build trust.
Make sure you're not the one writing it; have someone else write it, because it needs to be as unbiased as possible.
To create a Wikipedia page for your business, check this how-to guide made by Wikipedia itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_create_a_page
10. Video Promotions
What’s the first thing that comes into your mind when you hear the phrase video promotions? Is it an image of YouTube? Right now, there are plenty of ways on how you can use video promotions and everything all starts with making your own video. A good tip to remember is to use a good quality video camera for recording your video.
There are plenty of video recorder options out there that you can choose from for filming your videos. You can also look for a software program which can help you in editing and promoting your videos on online websites such as YouTube. The beauty of video promotions lies in the fact that these are very easy to do.
Why do you need to use video promotions for promoting your business? Well, it is pretty simple. Videos can go viral and spread online rather quickly. You can also present these on social media sites or other websites.
With videos, your potential customers and clients can see what is happening in your business and get a glimpse of what are you trying to promote or sell. It can bring a good deal of personalization. At this day and age where videos are in, it just makes sense to use these videos for your promotions. When a video is made and produced properly, it has a big potential of grabbing the attention of anyone really quickly.
Similar to photo sharing, you can choose to share or publish your product videos, product reviews and expert opinions and make these public in YouTube, Dailymotion, Metacafe and more.
Start using video marketing now, share your video everywhere and you will get backlinks to your website: it's that simple.
11. RSS, W3C and CSS Directories Submission
When you have a web design website or you provide services that are related to web design, you can submit your site to W3C and CSS website directories which can drive more traffic to your site. You can also submit your site to RSS feed directories that will then again help you achieve more traffic.
On your website, you should have a RSS feed. If you don’t have one or don’t know what it is, please check it, create one and submit it to RSS directories.
Here are the best websites to submit your RSS feed (Please do, this will not take you too much time and will build backlinks almost instantly):
- Feed Bucket
- Feed Listing
- Plazoo
- R-Bloggers
- RedTram (en.redtram.com/pages/addsource/)
- Blogarama (www.blogarama.com/members/add-listing)
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12. Creating Contests
Again, one of those best off-page SEO techniques that is underused. Creating contests is fairly easy and you will get quality backlinks from them.
This strategy takes a bit more time but is so effective. Entering contests is great, but creating them is even better. By requiring your participants to write about & link to the contest from their blog, you'll not only get links from them, but their posts will increase the exposure of your contest, thus growing your number of contestants at an exponential rate (and thus, the amount of links you get).
This needs work but it can be extremely effective.
13. Case Studies
The idea is the same as comparison or lists. If you talk about someone or a company, they will link back to you (Of course, they will link back to you only if you tell them about that case study).
14. Intern/Job Postings
If you have any job or internship opportunities, you can get a few easy .edu links. Contact universities or colleges about your job opening. They will probably put them on their channels and link back to you.
15. Interview and Get Interviewed
Interviewing industry experts will always be a fantastic way to attract links, but getting them to interview is only half the battle. The other half is asking great questions.
Just like you should interview others, seize opportunities to be interviewed, no matter how small the audience is. The 200 words that take you 10 minutes to write can give you a great backlink. Take any opportunity to be interviewed.
There's usually nothing you can do to open up opportunities like this, unless you're actively pursuing them. For example, see if there are any industry interview series of other people/companies that are on the same level of caliber as you.
Reach out to whoever is running them, introduce yourself, and say that you think you or your company might have a story that's worth telling. It can't hurt to ask, as long as your polite about it if they say no.
16. Comparisons
Compare products, services or companies on your blog. This is usually great because when you do, these companies will most like link to your content (If your review is positive.
17. Newsjacking
Instead of trying to cover news first, see if you can take advantage of currently hot topics through newsjacking. This is the practice of looking for new & upcoming stories then capitalizing on them by writing up a blog post on the topic. Because the topic is hot, there is much more sense people will link to you if you bring value and if your opinion is different.
18. Lists
Lists work great and the same way as comparisons. If you talk about several companies or influencers in a blog post, they will most likely link back to you.
19. Reclaim External Profile Page
People will sometimes link to profile pages of yours on external sites, so take advantage. This could be social profiles, business profiles, member profiles, or really anything else.
If for instance, a website links to your Facebook profile, you might want to contact them and ask them to link to your website instead.
20. Previous Linkers
If someone has linked to you in the past, chances are they might be willing to in the future. Get to know them, and make sure they're up to date with your content, because that only leads to more links. This is really a top off-page SEO tactic you have here.
21. Associations/Organizations You're A Part Of / Member
If you're a part of an association or organization, chances are they have a website. If they do, find out if they link out to their members. Get included if they do.
22. Asking Customers / Suppliers
If someone just bought something from you or you bought something from them, then this is the perfect time to ask for a link if they have any influence online.
23. Sponsor Venues / Events
Whether it's a local meet-up, industry conference, or anything in between, event groups are always looking for sponsors, and you can usually get a link in return for a small amount.
24. Host Your Own Events
Hosting local meetups or even paid events are excellent ways to get links from a variety of websites dedicated to events in general, as well as niche sites in your area that likely have a decent audience that you're looking to tap into.
25. Contest Giveaways
If you have a product or service, and if there's a relevant blogging contest taking place, reach out to the blogger running it and ask if you could give your product or service to the winner. They'd be more than happy to, and they'll give you a link on the contest page if you ask.
26. Help A Reporter Out (HARO)
Help A Reporter Out = HARO
What is that? This is a great way to get high quality backlinks. How? Head over to HARO, create a free account, choose your industry and interests.
You will receive emails on a daily basis from reporters/journalists/bloggers who need sources or experts advice. You just need to answer those emails with in-depth answers about your industry. If you helped the reporters, they will link back to you, your website or your content.
A lot of websites like Forbes, Inc and more use HARO. We discovered this linkbuilding strategy recently and we use it for a few of our customers. Since then, HARO became one of our best off-page SEO techniques. So, if you want to have the chance to get published in such publications for free, try HARO now.
27. Broken Links
This is also a great link building tactic that we will cover in another session because it can bring you a huge number of links. The scalability of finding broken links is outright unfair. In a nutshell, you'll be 1) finding pages that could potentially link to you, 2) looking for broken links on the page, and 3) if there are any, you'll let the webmaster know and ask if the broken link could be replaced with a link to you.
28. Create a Community in Social Networking Websites
Also called online reputation management, it is among the initial steps you need to take to start your process. You can also become a member of famous social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others and have your very own profile. Doing this will help a lot in expanding your network online as you connect with all your friends, share things with one another and promote your website or company to establish an online reputation. It is most likely similar as participatory web or web 2.0, which means that you can show your active participation regularly.
29. Directory Submission
Directory submission refers to the process which plays a crucial role in search engine optimization. It is also the process of choosing a site then adding this to another. The internet is filled with thousands of directories, which can range from free directories, to paid directories, manual directories or automatic directories. Basically, a directory on the internet which is a web directory is a site which provides a very extensive list of other sites, products and services all over the world. You are probably familiar with telephone directories and web directories as the same with these but you can find them online.
Most people may assume or believe that directory submission is now nothing but a thing of the past. Indeed, several years ago, directory submission was definitely the best off-page SEO technique out there. This is not the case anymore but when done well, it can still be effective. But, if you will really look at it, it is alive and thriving up to this day and age. This is purely dependent on how effectively you choose the directories and how efficiently you choose the category for your submission. While it may give quite delayed results, it is definitely worth doing it. You can submit your sites to topmost quality directories. There are currently numerous directories which provide paid listings although it might not be a good choice.
30. Search Engine Submission
As far as running a successful online business is concerned, getting a good ranking on search engines is the real secret.
There are some business owners who don’t seem to realize the importance of search engines to their online sales.
You have to approach search engine submission like the rest of your top priority plans for marketing.
Search engine submission, as you can see, will help a lot in pulling traffic to your site. Most potential customers make use of search engines when they are looking for products, services and opportunities online. Studies revealed that more than 85 percent of people who surf the net use these search engines to find the things they need and want.
As a business owner, you would like to ensure that your business site has high ranking in search engines. Thus, when you are a business owner or online marketer, you want to make the most out of search engines. Business productivity can be vastly improved through search engine submission. You can submit your site to the most famous search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Alexa, MSN and many others for you to get listed all for free.
31. Forum Postings
With a bit of research, forum posting can pay you off fantastically and at the same time, boost your search rankings online. Of course, you know that this means higher ranking which is equivalent to more organic visitors. And when there are more visitors, it will result to more revenues for your business.
Forum posting is almost the same in principle to article submissions wherein you post something on the internet which contains a link that points back to your website. The only difference is that instead of posting an article, this time around, you will post your comments on different forums.
You can create an online discussion board or forum of your own and share topics or start a discussion among your friends. You can also choose to reply or post a thread in other pre-existing forums which are service-related which will allow links in the signature that can be crawled by search engines or known as do-follow forums.
32. Social Bookmarking
Yet another powerful method to promote your website is none other than social bookmarking. Sadly, there are now plenty of people who spam social bookmarking websites without having the least idea on how these should be used. Since the contents in these sites update on a frequent basis, search engines prefer this kind of sites and usually visit them.
You can do social bookmarking in different websites right now. You have to be extra careful when you do this and you also need to handle the tags with care as these are very important to broadcast your news to a bigger area network. It may boost the traffic to your site based on the effectiveness of your participation.
33. Link Baiting
You have probably heard of link baiting at one point or another.
There are people who consider this as nothing but pure spam that they can hardly speak of it without their faces turning sour. There are also others who consider link baiting as their number one secret technique.
No matter what side you are on, it is best to know how link baiting really works and how you can use this to further enhance your traffic and search engine rankings.
Link baiting is sometimes referred to as posting things that are viral, useful, outrageous, shocking or cool that other sites cannot help but discuss which gives you a link as a result.
Let’s say that you have published or copied the content or news of another website on your own site or blog. Don’t forget to put the link to that site to serve as a reference. Do this for others and when your content is trustworthy enough, allow others to do this for you, too. It is another method to increase the popularity of your links.
34. Cross-Linking / Internal Linking
You can link to internal pages in your site wherever it is needed. This is often called internal linking. It increases the popularity of your internal link, which is another primary aspect of Google Page Rank algorithm. The most famous example of a good internal linking is Wikipedia. You can also try to get content link from blogs or sites which are related to the theme of your website.
Internal linking is often overlooked by companies but this is actually one of the best off-page SEO techniques out there. Why? Because you control the anchor texts by showing to search engines the structure of your website.
You can try to get a link from within the site content with the use of a targeted keyword as an anchor text in the same way that Wikipedia is doing. It is not a secret that this strategy might be a bit difficult to implement although these kinds of links have more weight from the point of view of search engines.
35. Link Exchange
Link exchanging refers to the process or exchange banner links or text links between sites. The use of link exchanges can help improve traffic with the help of different inbound links in order for users on other sites to click on them.
Most of the time, exchanging links is a free process, making link exchanges as a cost effective method. One more advantage of exchanging links is that this can help further improve your site placement in search engines.
For many years, link exchanges have been used by numerous webmasters as a method of direct marketing. This practice also managed to gain more popularity among the webmasters because search engines like sites that have a lot of inbound links, which improves positions in SERPs or search engine result pages. In the eyes of search engines, it is an accurate way to determine the importance of a website. This particular practice implemented by search engines for ranking websites has helped a lot in the popularity of the link based search engines such as Google.
You can choose to exchange links with the service related sites or also called thematic link exchange which can help boost the popularity of your link, which is a primary factor of the PageRank algorithm of Google. Just beware of black hats while you do exchanges.
36. Photo Sharing
If videos can be shared, why not share photos? You can also share or publish the pictures of your products on your website and make these public. Let all your friends and your entire network to see these photos and comment on them as well. This can help a lot in driving more traffic to your site. To get the best results, you can do it in the major photo sharing platforms such as Photo Bucket, Flickr and others.
37. Yellow Pages and Local Listings
Instead of going international and getting head on with huge competitions, you can make your site more local for your search engines to view your site with ease and get the content. It will help you reach your target audience. You can submit your site to Yahoo Local, Maps, Google Local, Superpages, Yellow Pages, Hotfrog, and so on.
38. Business Reviews
You can also write reviews about some other businesses or you can ask your clients or friends to write a review about your business in the major business review websites.
39. Press Release Promotion
For those who are service providers or business owners, you can go for a PR submission in the famous PR sites such as Open PR, 1888pressrelease, and PR Leap. It will help you a lot in publishing your website in Google News.
40. Article Submission
You can also write your own articles and submit these to famous article websites such as Ezine, Go Articles, and Buzzle (www.buzzle.com/). It will help you achieve some deeper links for your site although this is often a rather slow process.
41. Classifieds Submission
You can also go for classifieds submissions in order to advertise your services or products all for free. You can try Craigslist for this and other major classified websites such as Vivastreet, Myspace, Kugli, iMadespace, and others.
42. Answers
You can also join in Answers through asking and answering any relevant questions and adding a link to your site in the source section if needed. If you will not do it in a spammy way, it is a great method to boost your link popularity. The best sites to do it are in Yahoo Answers, Answer Bag, and Cha-Cha, to name a few.
43. Social Shopping Network
When you are running an eCommerce site, it is a great strategy for easily branding and advertising your products all for free. You can submit your items to Yahoo Online Shopping, Google Product Search, and MSN Online Shopping as well as many other major social shopping network sites such as Wists, Buzz Shout, Five Limes and Ohmybuzz.
44. Document Sharing and PPC Ad Campaign
You can share your site documents such as business documents, slides, and information brochures in Slide Share and Google Docs, for instance.
This can help in branding your site. If document sharing will not work for you, you can also go for PPC ad campaign using your targeted keywords.
Take note that you will need to pay in order to drive more traffic to your site with the help of PPC.
45. Gadget or Widget Development
Lastly, you can develop some innovative and interactive gadget or widget applications like game widgets or an online poll for your site then publish these on your site or blog or in other famous social networking websites such as Facebook. You can inform your friends about this and let others play, vote and use the application or widget which can further help you in improving your branding and site visits.
So, what are the best off-page SEO techniques and which one should you try?
Whether you work on on-page or off-page SEO, it's really difficult to do it on your own. Above are just some of the best off-page SEO techniques that you can try in order to further boost the success and growth of your business. As you can see, there are so many techniques available. But, which one to choose? We recommend you to start with guest blogging, niche directories and social media profiles. Indeed, niche directories and social media profiles will not take you too much time and can give a quick boost to your overall SEO. You need to know that because of the complexity of SEO, many companies decide to outsource search engine optimization in order to make sure their on-page and off-page SEO campaigns bring outstanding results.
On the other hand, if you started to work on on-page SEO and content marketing, starting to work on guest blogging will not only give you quality backlinks, this will also give you exposure and show your thought leadership in your industry.
Then, we suggest testing many of the off-page SEO techniques we mentioned above. Even if quality links should be your priority, having diversified types of backlinks is usually a good sign to Google. For instance, you don't want all your backlinks to be guest posts or directories. So, to have a lot of different kind of backlinks, the best way is to apply many of the best off-page SEO techniques mentioned above. Also, when working on your website's SEO, don't forget to get help from SEO tools and SEO experts.
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