Off-Page SEO or Off-Site SEO are steps taken outside your website to improve your ranking with search engines. Off-site ranking elements for optimization means improving search engine and user understanding of a site’s overall popularity, authority, trustworthiness, and relevance. This can be done using reputable sites or places on the internet including pages, people, sites, etc. This entails linking to or promoting your website and effectively confirming the quality of your content. Both off-page and on-page SEO have their parts in successfully ranking in the search engines.

Does Off-Page or Off-Site Really Matter?

Search algorithms and ranking elements are constantly changing. The general thought in the SEO community is whether the authority, relevancy, and trustworthiness are effective SEO factors. If yes, off-page SEO for a website is still a major part of a page’s ability to rank besides its other part, on-page SEO.

Backlinks & Off-Page SEO

Creating backlinks is at the core of off-page SEO. Search engines use backlinks as implications to see if the quality of the content being connected to the backlinks is good. As an example, a site with many high-quality backlinks will probably rank higher than another site with very few or lower-ranking backlinks.

There are 3 kinds of links that are described by how they were acquired, manually built links, self-created links, or natural links.

• Manually Built Links

You can create manually built links by using deliberate link building actions. This includes getting others to link to your website or getting help from influencers to share your content

• Self-Created Links

These links are created by various actions such as adding a backlink to an online directory, in a forum, as a blog comment signature or using a press release with optimized anchor text. Some self-created link creations have a tendency to lean toward black hat SEO which is pretty much frowned upon by search engines so it’s advisable to tread gently using this approach.

• Natural Links

These links are given without any action taken on the part of the page’s owner. As an example, someone who has a blog whose theme is food might have a link directing readers to his or her favorite produce market or farm. These links are considered natural.

Quite honestly, how the links are obtained has little to do with those that offer the best contribution to SEO efforts which are those links that pass the most equity. There are many signs that positively contribute to the equity passed, such as:

• The popularity of the linked site
• How relatable the linking site’s theme is to the site being linked to it
• How fresh or new the link is
• The anchor text used on a particular linking page
• How trustworthy the linking site is
• How many links do you have on the linking page
• The authority of the domain and page linking

Off-Site SEO for Non-Link-Related

Even though earning links from other sites is the most popular practice for page SEO strategies, just about any activity that takes place outside your own website or helps to improve your search ranking could be considered as “Off-Page SEO including:

• Guest Blogging
• Social Media Marketing
• Influencer Marketing
• Linked And Unlinked Brand Mention or Acknowledgments

Notice that the activity is to simply reference your site from elsewhere on the web. You can reference your brand or website link. Search engines assert different weight per type of referencing sites so it’s best to spread out instead of sticking to one direction.

How to Apply Off-Page SEO

Getting links from quality, trustworthy, and reputable sites or mentions of your brand will help with any level of off-page SEO for your website. Remember to apply good on-page SEO and your website will rank in the search engines. Check out our On-Page SEO Checklist for more information, as well as a useful video about more off-page SEO techniques.