Off-page SEO means instead of optimizing your website, perform various practices to bring traffic to your website. It may seem useless to many, this is a technique still used by google to allocate the position of your website in searches. Google checks how many people are visiting your website through other links and blogs, and through it, Google decides the quality of your website.
Is off-page SEO important?
Yes, it matters a lot. If you’re a business owner looking forward to attracting more people to your website, then only google searches won’t help you. SEO basically means to bring your website in front of people, which is off-site SEO means to tell people about your website, and not to Google.
Backlinks: Core of off-page SEO
Search Engines determine the quality of a website by many factors, and backlinks are one of them. They simply are links to your website which are present in other website blogs, posted through your social media account in a promotional poster, paying influencers to post them through their accounts for promotion, and many other ways. But the main goal is to spread information about your website as much as possible, but not through the web directly.
There is a total of three types of classification of backlinks, which are defined by how they were earned:
- Natural Links – they are the type of links that are included in other people’s websites and blogs that contain information referencing your website or any product offered by your website. This is mainly not done by you or controlled by you, this happens naturally, hence, natural links.
- Manually built links – these types of links are the ones where you are involved. Such as asking your customer to link your website with theirs or promoting your website through an influencer’s account. This requires manual work to be done, either by you, your employees, or by the digital marketing agency which you have hired.
- Self-created links – links that are created by adding them in online directories, forums, blog comments, etc. These kinds of practices are sometimes counted as Black-hat SEO because many people try to build backlinks through bad practices, so it’s better to stay off of these kinds of links.
Other ways for off-site SEO
As explained before, the main goal is to create some kind of reference to your website other than the web. This can also be achieved by offline marketing, social media marketing (even saying about your brand), linked/unlinked brand mentions at various places, etc.
What matters the most is to do it the right way. Many people buy backlinks from untrusted sources as they ask less than others, and this can lead to the blacklisting of your site, if detected by Google. It’s also important to use the links carefully, such as not creating too long links, to solve this issue, there are many link shortening websites that you can utilize. They are pretty easy to use and some even pay you for using their services!