What is off-page SEO?
Off-page SEO (also known as off-site search engine optimization) refers to actions taken outside of your website to enhance your websites rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs)
Essentially it is trying to improve a websites’ popularity, relevance, authority and trustworthiness in the eyes of the websites visitors and search engines such as Google.
What are off-page SEO ranking factors?
Off-page SEO ranking involves getting other authoritative web pages, websites and people linking to or promoting your website.
Why does off-page SEO matter?
Off-page SEO tells search engines what others think about your website.
Although no one knows exactly what factors search engine algorithms take in to consideration when ranking a website, more knowledgeable people than us believe that off-page SEO still plays a major part in how a website ranks – approximately 50% of the ranking factor weight. It may be more or less than this – but the takeaway is that it is an important figure to take notice of.
What off-page SEO factors matter?
A difficult question to answer and they do vary over time as Google and other search engines updated their algorithms but the following factors can have an influence to a greater or lesser degree:
- Quantity of links to the web page
- Quality/authority/trust of the site linking to the web page
- The ‘pagerank’ of the site linking to the web page
- Quantity of links on the site linking to the web page
- The anchor text of the link to the web page
- The quality/relevance of the website linking to the web page
- Offline use of the brand / domain name
- Mentions of brand / domain in news/media/press/professional association
- Quantity / quality of social media metrics – tweets, likes, shares, pins etc
- Traffic / usage signals from browsers, analytics etc
- Link related off-page SEO
Backlinks are at the heart of off-page SEO. Although Google claims that backlinks are not used as a ranking factor, evidence proves otherwise.
Search engines use backlinks as an indication of the quality that the link refers to – it vouches for the quality of the content.
A site with many links from other quality websites will usually outrank another website without those links. Websites link to web pages that provide value to their users.
There are 3 types of links:
- Natural links – links are made by the web page creator without any action required by the web page owner.
- Manually built links – made via deliberate link building activities by the web page owner – getting customers to link to your website, getting ‘influencers’ to link and even paid links
- Self-created links – these include links in online directories, forums, blogs, comment signatures.
There are high value links and poor quality links. Their value or effectiveness will depend upon:
- The websites popularity – links from pages with high traffic are more powerful than links from pages that have less traffic
- Relevance to the subject
- Freshness
- The anchor text used
- The authoritativeness
- Trustworthiness of the website
- Reputation
- The number of other links on the web page
- Site security
- Country
- Location
- History
- Is the site blacklisted or blocked?
- Is it a home page link?
- Dofollow or nofollow link
- Contextual link
- What prompted website owner to link to you?
- How natural is your link profile
Non link related off-page SEO
Not all off-page SEO is link related – anything that helps to improve your ranking position could be thought of as off-page SEO – much of this relies in human behaviour – to create a reference to your website from elsewhere on the internet this can be on:
- Social media
- Guests blogging
- Brand mentions – your website url or brand name without a link
- ‘Influencer’ marketing
- Citations of your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number)
- Book marking
- Video
- Podcasts
- Interviews
- Article writing
- Positive reviews
- Google My Business
- RSS Feed Subscription
- Building relationships with companies / people off line
- Document Sharing
Get visible and you will be noticed!
Explanation of SEO on Wikipedia
How Can We Help You With Off-page SEO?
JSP Web Design can help improve your websites off-page SEO by improving search engine and visitor perception of your website’s quality – to encourage websites to link to you, to get mentions of your brand/website, shares of your content and others vouching for the quality of your content/business.
Of course when you get all this lovely authority link juice coming in to your website and web pages you have to make sure that it flows to all the right places with a great website structure – which we can help you with as well!
