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What is Off-Page SEO and How to Implement it?

(Courtesy of Web Marketing Academy, Rated Best Digital Marketing Training Institute in Bangalore)

Off-Page SEO in other words is also called Off-site SEO.

Off-Page SEO refers to optimization activities or actions taken outside of your website to increase the rankings of your website in SERP. 

Off-Page activities are mainly referred to as link-building, which means getting links from external websites that point to your website (BackLinks). Off-Page SEO is all about other websites mentioning your website link in their website. It is more like recommendations. Other websites recommending your website.

Why is Off-Page SEO important?

When it comes to SEO every webmaster starts their optimization from on-page but is that enough for us to rank our website in Search engines.

Let us take a scenario when there was a time where there is no internet, at that time how do you find the best restaurant, best school, best product or the best doctor. We use to ask people, friends, to figure out which is the best one. Which means it is all about trustworthiness and recommendations.

The same logic is what Google also considers, like how many websites are recommending your website. This is the first algorithm Google has launched to rank websites in SERP which is called Page Rank. Page rank is the score assigned to a page between 1 -10 based on the number of links pointing to that website or webpage.

Nowadays Off-Page SEO is not about just the number of links, it is beyond that. It also includes where you are getting the links from, who is giving the link, how good their website is and how they are pointing the link.

Below are the factors, Google considers for ranking a webpage based on Backlinks:- 

  1. Link Volume
  2. Link authority
  3. Anchor text
  4. Link Placement

Link Volume:- Refers to the total number of backlinks your website has.

Link Authority:- Refers to the popularity of the linking site, relativeness of the linking site to your website/webpage, the trustworthiness of the linking site, and authority of the linking site.

Anchor Text:- Refers to how are the links placed. If a link is placed using a keyword ( like a hyperlink to the keyword) or just the URL is mentioned. A link placed using a keyword has more value than a link without a keyword.

 Note:- When a link is placed using an image, then Google considers the alt text of the image as the Anchor text.

Link Placement:- Refers to where the links are placed within the page. Note:- Links placed in the body of the page along with the content have more weightage (also called Link Juice) than the links buried in the sidebar or footer as the links in the content go with the flow of the page and into the context. 

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How Does Off-Page SEO Help in Ranking:- 

When you get links from external websites, one-third page rank of that particular webpage will be transferred to your webpage which will help in the increase in page rank of your website.

For More Details:- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Follow Vs No Follow Links:- 

Do you know Google Crawler/Bot is also called Web spider, because while Google is crawling a web page, if it finds any links on that page then it crawls those links also, for example, website “ A” points to a link to Website “B”. Now when Google crawls website A, it finds the link of website B on that page then it goes and crawls that website B also.

Now what is Follow and No Follow:

Website while giving the link to any website they can tell whether Google should follow the link and crawl that webpage or not to follow the link and not to crawl that webpage.

Follow:- Command that suggests crawler to follow the link and crawl that webpage

No, Follow- Command that suggests crawler not to follow that link (i.e) not to crawl that webpage.

Note:- Backlinks pointing to your website with a no-follow command will not pass the link juice, so it will not help in increasing the SEO Ranking. Only Follow links help in SEO rankings.

How to Implement Off-Page SEO (Get backlinks):- 

Getting backlinks to a website is an ongoing process, more importantly, don’t focus on getting more backlinks, focus more on getting quality backlinks, as we all know that participating in link schemes or having more low-quality backlinks can have a negative impact on your website SEO rankings or some times even get penalized.

So before you start the process of getting backlinks, it’s always important to check the quality of the website from where you want to get a backlink.

In the initial days, Google used to show the page rank of any website or webpage publicly, which means you can go and check the page rank of any website and try to get links only from a website that has a high page rank. As many people are misusing it Google stopped showing the page rank of web pages. But you can use some 3rd party tools to check the quality or authority of a webpage which is somewhat similar to page rank but not exactly.

  1. Moz Tool or Moz Bar Chrome Extension:- 

Moz is an SEO tool that helps in analyzing your SEO efforts and also helps in spying on competitor activities.

Moz analyzes a website based on many ranking factors and gives you an authority score of 1 – 100. Where 100 is the highest weightage and 1 is the lowest weightage.

Moz gives you two different scores one for the overall website called Domain Authority (DA)  and scores for individual pages called Page Authority (PA).

To check the DA and PA of any website/web page, Go to Chrome extensions -> Search and Add Moz Bar Extension. Once you add it, Create a free account and login in Moz website.

Now when you go to any website or when you search with any keyword in Google, Moz Bar will show the DA and PA for each website and webpage in SERP as shown in the above image.

  1. aHrefs Tool:- 

Ahrefs is also another tool that will help you to analyze your SEO efforts and spy on competitor activities.

In Ahrefs, they refer to the Authority of a website with UR (Url Rating) and DR (Domain rating)

Types of backlinks:-

There 3 types of backlinks 

  1. Natural:- Backlinks that you get without doing any activity, Means people mentioning your website link on their website without you asking them. For 

Example1:- You have written an educational article that people find useful, so when they write anything related to that topic they mention your website link as a reference or source.

Exampe2:- Your happy customers writing a review or a testimonial about your product or service in their website or blog recommending it to others. 

Note:- Natural backlinks can only happen when you offer the best/useful/rich content on your website or offer the best product/service along with a great customer experience. 

  1. Manual:- Manual Links are activities you deliberately do to acquire new links for external websites, like contacting influencers and bloggers and ask them to recommend or write a review about your product or service in their blog. In this scenario, you don’t create a backlink but you ask for people to give or mention your link.
  2. Self-Created:- Self-created links are where you go and create these links by registering a local directory, creating social media profiles, answering in Q&A forums. These links are created by you.

Few ways to get backlinks:-

  1. Local Directory submission:- Get links by registering your business in Local directory websites like JustDial, Yellow Pages, Sulekha Classifieds, Google My  Business, Magic Pic, Foursquare, and so on 
  2. Industry Based Directories:- Signup in directories that are industry-specific like Practo for Doctors and hospitals, Zomato for Restaurants, yet5 for Training institutes, Commonfloor, and 99cares for Real estate.
  3. Social Media Sites:- Create accounts in all social media accounts mentioning website URL, like FB page, Twitter Handle, Linkedin page, Youtube Channel
  4. Job Posting Sites:- Create Profiles in all Job portals like Naukri, Monster, Indeed
  5. Content Sharing Platforms:- Create Accounts in all the content sharing platforms like Pinterest/ Flickr for images, Slideshare for PPTs, Soundcloud for Audio, Youtube and Daily Motion for Video, and so on. It’s similar to universal SEO.
  6. Q&A Sites:- Creating Profiles and actively answering questions related to your domain or website along with the website links. Few Q and A sites are Quora, yahoo answers, Ask.com
  7. Event websites:- If you are in a company where they do lots of events and webinars then the best way to get backlinks is through sharing the events on event hosting platforms like Event Brite, Mera events, Meetup, and so on.

Note:- These are some of the ways to build backlinks but not limited only to this. But whatever method you follow to get backlinks to keep quality in the first place rather than quantity.

What is Disavow Tool:

If you feel your website ranking is getting affected because of the spam backlinks and when you don’t have control over it. You can report those backlinks to Google by using the Disavow Tool.