Sure, on-page optimisation is important, but if you’re relying solely on this method, then you’re not reaching your full potential. A successful SEO plan involves a significant amount of off-page SEO as well. This ensures that search engines like Bing, Google, and others know which sites trust you. So what is off-page SEO, why is it so important, what are its benefits and how can you conduct it? Let’s discuss these elements.
What is Off-Page SEO?
Off-page SEO is any method that can be used to improve your site’s position in the search engine results. These activities typically take place outside of your website. While many Singapore business owners associate off-page SEO with link building, there is much more to it. It requires a diverse amount of advertising strategies.
Why is Off-Page SEO important?
The prime goal of search engines is to provide the user with the best results possible. And the best way to do this is to take into account your on-page and off-page SEO. Off-page SEO is a good indication of how much authority you have because it often signals that other people are talking about your brand. Search engines understand that high-quality websites are more likely to have more links from other sites than those that are low quality. This includes social media likes, tweets, and pins.
What Are the Benefits?
There are several benefits to off-page SEO. First, if done correctly, you will see a noticeable increase in your rankings. Your website will likely be on the first page of most search engines which means an increase in traffic. Second, you will notice a change in PageRank. This is the metric that Google assigns to websites to denote their level of importance and relevance. Lastly, your brand will experience greater exposure. The higher you are in the rankings, the larger your audience and the greater your number of social mentions.
Link Building
One of the most popular forms of off-page SEO is link building. Whenever an external link is pointed to your website, it acts as a vote. Let’s say that someone found one of your articles helpful so they posted a link to it from their own blog or website. This tells the search engines that the information is valuable. And this adds to your credibility. The more external links you have, the more “votes” you have. And the more votes you have, the higher you appear in the search results.
However, it’s important to note that link building is about more than quantity, it also requires quality. Google is more concerned about where your links are coming from. The more authoritative a website is, the more weight the search engine will give to that vote.
The best way to build links is to do it naturally, meaning allow website owners to link to posts they actually like. This requires your publishing excellent content. Another great way to build links is to guest post on relevant blogs.
Social Media
Social media is a key part of off-page SEO. And that’s because social media can bring a considerable amount of dark traffic to your site. It’s also a great venue for forming connections and getting recognition.
Many SEO experts will advise their clients to spend time nurturing lasting relationships on these platforms. Reach to the top influencers in your brand. And follow up by meeting with them in person, at events, and through online chats. These interactions can ensure that you are on their radar and they will be more likely to share your content. It also opens the door for future collaborations for your two sites.
There are several things to keep in mind when using social media for on-page SEO. First, you need to continuously monitor your account. Answer questions and respond to as many comments as possible. You should also strive to make a connection. Be human in your responses and interactions. Finally, you need to be proactive. Try to be a resource for your community.
Forums and Comments
If you want to laser target your audience, then it’s important that you know where they hang out. And for most industries, this means that you should take the time to visit forums and discussion boards. Want to get noticed by your desired audience and the influencers they follow? Go to industry-specific message boards and leave thoughtful comments. Participate in the discussions and provide helpful answers. The more value you provide, the more likely the audience there will take an interest in your profile and website.
Another great way to get your audience’s attention is to leave comments on related websites. Just as is the case with forums, you can always visit a popular blog related to your niche and leave a thoughtful comment. You can even comment on sites like Quora and Reddit. Not only can this strategy catch the eye of your audience, but also the site owner and influencer.
Video and Images
Off-page SEO also requires experimenting with different types of content. Instead of focusing on text, try incorporating video. Research shows that by 2019, videos will account for over 80% of the content that is shared online. Videos and images work well for off-page SEO because they can be a low investment and offer a high return in the form of awareness and traffic. It’s also great for enhancing your reputation.
Try posting tutorials on Youtube. Recap your most recent events on Facebook Live. Share funny office moments on Snapchat. Create image albums on Flickr, Imgur, and other photo-sharing sites. Tweet videos of the most interesting parts of your day.
The best thing about using videos and images for your off-page is that they are an excellent way to show your personality and make your brand more human. This helps you to form a deeper connection with your audience. The more people see your videos, the more they learn about your brand.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is nowhere as near as popular as it used to be. However, it can still be a great way to get more traffic to your site. The sites you use will largely depend on what niche you’re in. However, most industries can benefit from signing up to Stumbleupon, Reddit, Delicious, and Scoop.it.
Genius Insights on Three Powerful Off-Page SEO Techniques
When Google flips a wing, the whole web is shaken, and everyone starts looking for ways of ensuring that their site ranking is not compromised. With so many unexpected algorithm updates reshaping the digital marketing realm, it is imperative for digital marketers to focus on not only On-Page Seo but also Off-Page Seo.
There is a significant difference between the two – On-Page Seo refers to the things that are done on the website to improve its ranking and conversion rates. On the other hand, Off-Page Seo refers to improvements that are done off the website to improve its ranking and ability to channel more customers to the business.
Here are three powerful Off-page Seo techniques you can use to position your online business for success.
Blog Marketing
Having consistent communication with the target audience will be instrumental in generating more sales online. You can achieve this goal by posting comments on blogs that are related to your niche and adding links to your site in the comment sections. Over time, these links will get noticed by the search engines bots and will impact your ranking positively.
Social Networking Sites
Interacting with potential customers on social media sites is one of the fundamental steps that you can take to advertise your brand and create a credible online reputation for your business. Most people who are already doing this focus only on the major social media platforms such as Facebook, unaware of the fact that even the less-popular platforms are also effective in increasing traffic to the website as well as boosting conversion rates.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is another awesome way of increasing your site’s online presence and popularity. Submit your blog posts to authority bookmarking sites such as Digg and Reddit to promote the site to a larger audience. Search engines are fond of these sites because the content is updated more often. Be sure to use tags correctly to get positive results from this Off-page Seo technique.
Using the right Off-page Seo techniques will set your website apart from the rest. You could delegate these tasks to members of your team who have the necessary skills and expertise to create time for other equally important tasks.
9 White Hat Off-Page SEO Remedies for Success in 2021 and Beyond
Off-site SEO is equally important if you want to drive more traffic to your website. Sure, on-site SEO will help you but to promote the sustainability of your business, you need these strategies. With Google continuously changing its algorithms, it is recommendable to hire a professional SEO company in Singapore to monitor and maintain your website.
That said, here are 9 white hat off-page SEO strategies that you can count on to help your online business thrive in 2021 and beyond.
1. Link Building
Backlinks are highly regarded by search engines when ranking websites. They are used to determine a website authority in a particular niche, so if you have many websites pointing back to your site, search engines will perceive you as an authority and reward you with a high ranking.
Consider links as applause from other websites to your brand. In the past, webmasters were so obsessed with these links that they used illegal or black hat strategies such as link exchange schemes, comment links, article directories, link networks, and private blog networks.
All these strategies have since been listed as black hat strategies and you will be penalized if found using them to beat the system. You should focus on getting as many good-quality backlinks as possible. The quality of the link is dependent on the domain authority, topic or content match between your website and the linking website, popularity, link freshness, anchor text, page authority, and trustworthiness of the website.
Looking for links from the smaller or newer brands is also good but make sure that the website is not listed as a scam and the content is related to your industry. Make sure that you use the right keywords as anchor text to guide the Google bot as it crawls the website.
Photo Credit: Ahrefs Site Explorer
A link from an authority website such as Wikipedia will shoot your website to the top of search engine results pages. Non-profit, educational, and government websites are also great for backlinking. Keep tabs on the health of your backlink profile by using tools such as Site Explorer. This tool will help you to know which sites are linking to your website and the specific pages that offer the most link juice.
Photo Credit: Ahrefs Site Explorer
The tool will also identify broken links to ensure that they don’t harm your SEO efforts. Be sure to remove links from sites that are listed as scam as well as adult sites. While at it, carry out competitor backlink research to know which sites your competitors are getting links from and target them.
Below is a YouTube video of Andrey Lipattsev that discusses the importance of backlinks when ranking websites. Andrey works at Google as Search Quality Senior Strategist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8VnZCcl9J4&feature=emb_logo
2. Leverage Social Media Platforms
Singapore has 4.6 million social media users across different platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Nowadays, Google closely monitors social signals to understand how brands interact with audiences via social media platforms.
The more shares and likes you get on social media the better. You can achieve this goal by sharing engaging, fresh and relevant content with your followers. If the content resonates with their needs, rest assured they won’t hesitate to share it with their friends and colleagues. Here are three major tips on how to leverage social media for SEO.
Be Responsive
As an online business, rest assured that people will discuss your brand on social media. The comments may be positive or negative depending on the quality of the product or service you render to them. Show the audience that you care about their interests by responding to the comments in a timely manner. Remain as professional as possible when responding to negative comments to avoid jeopardising your credibility
Hire Influencers
Influencers will help to expand your clientele base significantly. All you have to do is hire influencers whose followers are directly interested in your brand. For instance, if you sell fitness equipment, look for an influencer who is a fitness enthusiast. Give them incentives such as discounts and free products as a reward for posting about your brand on their social media profiles.
The posts will greatly help to boost traffic to your site as well as sales. This tip is of paramount importance especially if your products target the young generation. In a recent survey, 70% of teens trust influencers more than conventional celebrities such as musicians.
Pay Attention to your Online Reputation
Your reputation online will either make or break your business. Strive to maintain a positive reputation to continue drawing customers to your website. Treat brand mentions preciously as they will help you to thrive and surpass your competitors. Note that brand mentions are actually considered as backlinks by Google bots – make sure they link back to your website.
3. Blog Commenting
Blog commenting is a delicate off-site SEO hack that you should handle with care lest you be penalised by Google. In the past, websites would fill up blogs with thousands of comments with links to their websites. Be different and do it the right way – only comment on blogs whose comment is related to your niche. Make sure your comments are not recycled across the different websites.
What does that mean? Your comments should always be unique and relevant to the blog as well as the readers. Lucky you, if the comments attract responses from other readers, as Google will notice that you comment, is genuine and not just went to win a backlink.
4. Include an RSS Feed Subscription Box
The first thing to note is that you are better off having several legit and genuinely interested subscribers visiting your online store regularly than a thousand one-time visitors who don’t even convert. You can easily achieve this goal by including an RSS feed subscription box on your blog section and other relevant pages.
Make sure this box is placed in a strategic location to capture the attention of the website visitors. Use trigger words such as “Subscribe” and “Join us” to encourage them to input their email addresses. Once you have the email addresses, start sending out value-packed emails to them but be subtle about it to prevent the emails been marked as spam.
Note that subscribers who provide their email addresses are interested in learning more about your brand and its service. So, you can convince them to make a purchase by giving them a special discount on their first order.
5. Guest Posting is Still Powerful
Guest posting is still one of the most powerful off-page SEO strategies that you can use to get ahead of the competition this year. Make sure that the articles you send out to the selected websites are full of valuable information related to your brand. For example, if you offer interior design services, you can write informative articles about interior design trends and have it published on other websites that are in this niche.
Make sure that the guest post is 100% unique and has proper links to your website. As mentioned earlier, anchor text is important to ensure that you hyperlink the right words or phrases. Be different from brands that use guests posts for advertising, your content should not mention your brand in any way, instead, it should offer valuable information that the readers are looking for online. You should only include a link to your website once or twice in the content.
6. Focus on Building Trust and Credibility
Previously, we discussed the importance of making sure that your reputation online is upbeat. To emphasis that point, you need to also focus on building trust and credibility with existing and new customers that you are targeting.
Transparency is key if you want to be trusted by customers. One sure way of achieving this goal is by making sure that every article or post you publish has useful content. Don’t even dare to deceive the readers using catchy titles and hashtags. If the content is poor or inaccurate, rest assured that the customers will not bother to visit your website.
Two primary factors that search engines use to determine the credibility of a website is domain authority and page authority. Regularly check the two metrics to know how your website pages are performing.
Photo Credit: Amazon.com
Use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to show the website visitors that your brand and credible and the site is secure. SSL ensures that the data transferred from the website servers to the visitor’s browser is secured and private. Website visitors gravitate towards websites that go the extra mile to guarantee their safety as they browse the websites.
Photo Credit: Amazon.com
Requesting customers to give a rating and feedback on your social media pages will help you get ahead of the curve. That is if you have a high rating, potential customers who are not yet sure if they should convert will be convinced by the rating to do so. As a result, direct traffic will increase as well as the conversion rate.
Photo Credit: Facebook.com
In addition, you can use the reviews to better understand your potential customers. For instance, if you realize that most of them are unaware of how to use the product, you can write an article about it and distribute it as a guest post. Share a link to that article on your social media pages to convey the intended message effectively.
7. Video Submission
Video is one of the most powerful marketing tools in the current digital marketing sphere. 54% of online customers appreciate video content from brands before making a purchase. This explains the increase in the number of videos posted on social media and other websites. Influencers are continuously coming up with creative videos that are fun to watch to market brands in a customer-oriented and memorable way.
Create stellar videos and post them on your YouTube channel. Make sure that the title and meta description has target keywords to make it easy for the audience to find it. Also, include links in the description to direct the viewers to your website.
Here is a table of the top video sharing websites that you can use to drive more traffic to your website and enhance SEO.
| Website | Domain Authority | Page Authority |
| https://www.youtube.com/ | 99 | 100 |
| https://vimeo.com/ | 97 | 96 |
| https://www.dailymotion.com/in | 96 | 67 |
| https://vine.co/ | 90 | 71 |
| https://www.metacafe.com/ | 88 | 76 |
Before posting the video in any of these websites, take a look at the requirements. Like social media posts, regularly check out the comments and respond to them to keep the audience engaged.
8. Infographics Submission
Infographics have the ability to increase website traffic by more than 12%. This statistic is because users respond to visuals better than blocks of text. 65% of businesses use them to market their products and services.
Make sure that you use the right colours to spark the interest of the audience. Google bots are now capable of recognizing infographics and will reward you accordingly. The high click-through rate and increase in the amount of time that the audience spends on the page will also translate into a better ranking.
On the other hand, if the bounce rate is high, Google will think that the content does not meet the requirements thereby affecting your SEO efforts negatively.
Here are the top five websites that you can submit an infographic to today.
| Website | Domain Authority | Page Authority |
| http://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics | 91 | 69 |
| http://visual.ly/ | 78 | 70 |
| http://www.infographicsarchive.com/ | 55 | 52 |
http://submitinfographics.com/ |
47 | 47 |
| http://www.nerdgraph.com/ | 45 | 50 |
9. Image Submission
There are a plethora of websites that you can submit images about your brand and products for SEO and marketing purposes. Before sending the images, make sure they are properly optimised by including the right title tags, description, and URLs. All three components should have the target keywords.
Here are the top 5 image-sharing websites.
| Website | Domain Authority | Page Authority |
| https://www.mediafire.com/ | 94 | 79 |
| https://in.pinterest.com/ | 94 | 82 |
| https://instagram.com/ | 93 | 100 |
| https://www.flickr.com/ | 92 | 95 |
| https://imgur.com/ | 92 | 82 |
Conclusion
While on-page SEO is a valuable part of connecting with your audience, off-page SEO is just as important. A successful SEO campaign requires the use of both methods. The techniques you use will depend on your niches, goals, and preferences. No matter what SEO agency you work with or tips and techniques you choose, make sure that it is something that engages your audience. And most importantly, make sure that your website features a great design and quality content so that the audience that you attract won’t be disappointed when they are led to your page.
