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What most people associate off-page SEO techniques with is the sole activity of link building. However, SEO involves much more than that; and the so-called off-page techniques also include promotion methods that have the purpose of taking the website higher in the search engine results.
In order to make a distinction between the On Page and Off Page SEO techniques, let’s start right from the beginning and figure out what search engine optimization is. SEO is a rather complicated process that has the goal to optimize a certain website for the search engine algorithms. This activity is important in order to get more visitors, as well as to expand the awareness for the brand and increase the website’s credibility. In a way, SEO is the language used to communicate with search engines in order to tell them more about a certain website and get it listed in their top results.
The two major components of search engine optimization are Off-Page and On-Page techniques, which we will explain in further details in this article.
On-Page SEO
The first point, where SEO starts from, involves the settings applied on the website in order to optimize it for the algorithms of search engines. In order to achieve such results, you should follow a few important tips for On Page search engine optimization:
- Effective external links (links to ‘bad’ sites and broken links should not be included)
- Constant updates with fresh content of high quality
- Google Authorship verification for all pages
- The pages should load fast
- 404 pages that are user-friendly
- Optimization of images (proper size and names for the images, as well as ALT tag usage)
- Proper text formatting
- Optimization of internal links
- Clean and user-friendly navigation
- Proper structure of URLs
- Optimized descriptions and titles
Off-Page SEO
The term Off-Page SEO is practically self-explanatory. It refers to the activities of search engine optimization that take place outside the website. Some of the most important techniques of Off-Page SEO include:
- Social bookmarking
- Social media
- Link building
The importance of Off-Page SEO and its benefits
In order to return the best results to the user, the search engines use Off-Page SEO because it shows them how the particular website is being perceived by the Internet users. All useful websites are being referenced from other websites and that’s why the search engines list them among the top results. If you manage to implement the Off-Page SEO techniques effectively, your website will gain many benefits:
- First of all, its rankings will be increased, which will lead to much more traffic.
- The PageRank will also be increased. This is one of the most important factors used by Google for website ranking, so it should never be neglected.
- The increased rankings will lead togreater exposure for the website. A well-ranked website gets more mentions in the social media, more visits and more links. As soon as this process starts, it will lead to a sequence of events that will build the website’s reputation more and more.
Social Bookmarking as an Off-Page SEO technique
This Off-Page SEO technique used to be much more popular in the past, but social bookmarking is still an effective way to increase a website’s traffic. Depending on the niche of your website, you can promote its content on popular websites like delicious.com, reddit.com, scoop.it, dig.com, stumbleupon.com and many others.
Social Media as an Off-Page SEO technique
Social media can easily be considered as another form of the link-building strategy. Although most links you will get from social media sites are ‘nofollow’, they still have a lot of value for your website’s success. The search engine optimization can be effectively boosted by the appropriate configuration of social media profiles, which is why the mentions in social media are gaining more importance as ranking factors.
Link Building – the most important Off-Page SEO technique
Link building is recognized as the most effective and most popular method of Off-Page search engine optimization. In order to get your website in front of its competitors in the eyes of a search engine, you have to build external links to it. For example, if this article is referenced by many Internet users who liked it, the search engines will recognize it as useful and they will rank it high for the appropriate keywords.
There were many techniques used by webmasters in order to build more links to their website, but most of those techniques are not recommended to be used today because they are being penalized by search engines, especially by Google. Some of those manipulative techniques of link building included:
- Link exchange schemes – establishing a contract with other webmasters in order to exchange links.
- Shared content directories – getting a couple of links through websites like infobarrel or hubpages, which allow publishing content and adding links to your website.
- Article directories – getting links by including them in articles published on article directory websites.
- Comment link – commenting on other people’s blogs and websites in order to get a backlink.
- Forum signatures – commenting on different forums with the goal of getting links back to your website (these links were usually included in the signature).
- Blog directories – this is something similar to the yellow pages, but each of the blog entries includes a link that leads back to your website.
As we said, all of these techniques should be avoided by webmasters because they are no longer effective as they used to be, and they can get a website penalized.
What are good links and how can you get them?
Link building should be observed as a matter of quality, not only quantity. It doesn’t really matter what number of links you have managed to achieve, but it matters where they are coming from. Natural links matter the most, and you get them by constantly providing high-quality content on your website. Getting to the point of achieving many natural links requires hart work, and the best way to achieve that is by publishing content that would inspire other people to link to it.
Guest blogging is another great way of building efficient links to your website. However, you shouldn’t overdo it and you shouldn’t do it only for the links.
Conclusion: On-Page SEO & Off-Page SEO can’t separated!
On-Page SEO is not the only important aspect of search engine optimization. Off-Page and On-Page techniques should work together in order to achieve great effects and get the website listed high in the search engine results.
You shouldn’t be focused on building links the easy way, because they have greater value if they are obtained from hard-to-get places.
SEO requires constant work and development according to the changes in the search engines. It was easy to get thousands of links to your website and rank it higher in the past, but today such a task requires much more sweat. However, it is still possible to achieve high rankings with hard work and proper promotion of a website – everything else follows naturally.
