Managing off-page SEO wisely …

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is one of those tricky parts of running a website that can get really labor-intensive. Beyond managing the content on your site itself, part of your SEO job is to manage how it relates to the rest of the internet. This external optimization work is called “off-page SEO,” and if you neglect it, you may never get the best possible search engine performance out of your site.

Off-page SEO measures make a significant contribution to how your site is ranked by the search engines. The sort of backlinks that point to your site are very important, along with several other criteria. To make your website as prominent as it deserves to be, you need to manage its off-page SEO wisely.

We’ve prepared this article to give you a solid grounding in off-page SEO: what it is, what it can do for your website.

We’ve also got five solid tips you can put to use improving your off-page SEO.

Ready to learn more? Read on!

Off-Page SEO (And Its Benefits) Defined

The way search engines rank websites is a complicated and somewhat opaque process. Steps you can take to alter your site for better search engine performance are all grouped together under the heading of “on-page SEO.”

Ranking signals that come from outside your site are influenced through “off-page” (or “off-site”) SEO. Backlinks are the usual go-to example of off-page SEO factors. Backlinks are valuable because the search engines use them to evaluate how much your site is valued by other websites. Obviously, you can’t simply clap your hands and wish good backlinks into existence. But you have indirect options that let you influence the quality of your backlinks and other off-page SEO factors!

5 Tips For Improving Off-Page SEO Performance

1) Make Full Use Of Social Media

Have you noticed in your online activities that big brands have a hard-to-miss presence on your social media streams? This is no accident. Major brands are on social media because it pays major dividends, and it can do the same for you. The key factor that should encourage you to stay active on social media is that there’s no better way to engage with your existing audience and reach out to new followers that will be receptive to your message.

It is hard to lay out the relationship between social media and your site’s SEO performance in a cut-and-dry fashion. Few marketers would argue that there’s any downside, from an SEO standpoint to maintaining a strong social presence.

Identify the social platforms that are most important to your target audience and make sure your site is active on them. If your organization is big enough, hiring a dedicated professional to handle your social media accounts is a good idea. If you’re still fairly small, social automation tools like Buffer can help keep the workload manageable.

Have patience with your social media efforts. Getting the traction you want takes time. Maintaining an active presence will begin to make a positive impact on your SEO performance over time. That means it’s better to get started sooner rather than later.

2) Build Effective Backlinks

Backlinks and the steps you can take to build them are one of the more contentious subjects in the SEO world. Proponents point out that websites with lots of backlinks earn higher search engine rankings. If you’re collecting lots of links from lots of different sites, somebody out there approves of what you’re doing.

The truth of the matter is that all backlinks are not created equal. You’ll want to concentrate your efforts on building really valuable backlinks, the kind that require effort and patience to get.

These are the general rules of thumb for attracting good backlink attention:

* Use your website to deliver engaging, high-quality content.
* Find blogs and sites which are relevant to your target audience and make comments there.
* Seek out opportunities to guest-blog for respected sites.
* Don’t be afraid to contact the owners of relevant, respected sites and ask them to link to you.

What we’ve found in our experience with off-site SEO is that prioritizing content creation is the right way to go. Make outreach your secondary priority rather than your first. If you concentrate on building a quality site, it’s that much easier to solicit links. With enough engaging content, you can get backlinks with minimal encouragement.

3) Diversify Your Content Portfolio

Today, the majority of websites still tend to cater to a single type of content. Blogs, for instance, are heavily focused on text. There’s nothing wrong with concentrating on your greatest strengths when it comes to your site’s content. Just bear in mind that different visitors will respond best to different ways of presenting information. Written articles are still the most common way to share your ideas. But you may be able to expand your audience by dabbling in infographics, podcasts, video, or other forms of content.

Building your website into a source for good content across multiple forms and media will broaden your reach considerably. When it comes to SEO – both on and off-site – visual content is particularly productive.

It’s true that building rich content like infographics and videos can be a challenge. To get started quickly, try adapting some of your existing content into a new format. If you’ve written a popular blog post on website automation, for instance, you can find new ways to present the same information. Some potential ideas:

* Record your screen to create a video tutorial and use your article to provide narration.
* Team up with other experts (people within your organization are fine!) to discuss website automation in a podcast.
* Turn the key points of your article into an infographic. There are user-friendly tools to help you do this for free, e.g. Canva.

Multiple content formats really pay off in backlink building and other forms of off-site SEO. Multimedia content is much more likely to be shared around if it delivers quality information. Your own efforts to share your content – posting your videos to YouTube or sharing your images on social media – can also deliver a direct boost to off-page SEO.

4) Build Your Up Your Site’s Reputation For Expertise

You probably have at least one expert – in your field or another industry that interests you – that you follow online. Maybe you stop by their blog regularly, subscribe to their video channels, or follow them on social media.

If you’d like to get a wider audience for your content, make sure viewers look to you as an expert. Publishing insightful, novel, and authoritative content is the way to get this ball rolling. The more knowledgeable and trustworthy you are, the more backlinks, social media mentions, and guest posting requests you’ll get. These are all powerful off-site SEO tools for improving your site’s search performance.

Think of demonstrating your expertise as a way to expand your site’s reach. Important steps include:

* Publishing trustworthy, in-depth content on a regular basis.
* Networking with other experts.
* Engaging with your audience (both within your site and on other platforms).

Take our own blog as an example. It tends to crop up alongside other popular WordPress sites, like WP Tavern. These clusters of respected, relevant sites don’t just come together by accident. What they have in common is regularly producing content for their niche that visitors find relevant and useful.

5) Get The Best Performance Out Of Your Website

Slow websites are popular with very few people. If your site delivers roughly similar value as a competing site which loads faster, you’re going to lose out on a lot of traffic. Website performance is important for off-site SEO because otherwise-enthusiastic site owners might reconsider linking to you if your pages run slowly.

To protect yourself from problems like this, make a habit of checking your site’s performance regularly. Keep an especially close eye on page loading times; you need to fix problems like that sooner rather than later if you want to avoid a negative SEO hit.

Summary

To get more attention from the search engines, your number one tool is strong, well-optimized content on your site. Investing a little time in off-page SEO can improve your results and boost your rankings faster.

Off-page SEO isn’t too hard as long as you go about it the right way. All five of these basic tips are important:

* Use social media frequently (and wisely)
* Seek out quality backlinks
* Produce content in multiple formats
* Establish a reputation as an expert
* Keep your site’s performance strong

Do you have off-page SEO tips of your own? Questions? Let’s talk about it in the comments section!