SEO basics What is off-page SEO?
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Off-page SEO is about everything that doesn’t happen directly on your website. Optimizing your website is called on-page SEO and includes things like site structure, content and speed optimizations. Off-page SEO is about, among other things, link building, social media, and local SEO. Or in other words, generating traffic to your site and making your business appear like the real deal it is. In this post, we answer the question: What is off-page SEO?
Creating exposure, trust and brand awareness
When focusing on on-page SEO, you’re doing everything in your power to make your site awesome. You write great content, have a solid site structure and your mobile site loads in just a couple of seconds. All is well in the world. Off-page SEO on the other hand, helps you to bring in those hordes of visitors and potential customers. Both are important pieces of the puzzle.
By writing quality content you can rank in search engines, but by getting a few great, relevant sites to link to that content, you’re increasing the chance that you’ll end up a couple of spots higher. The same goes for building your brand and creating trust. This doesn’t just happen on your site, but mostly off-site. Take reviews, for instance, these can make or break your company. You need them, but they most often appear on external sites. These are all factors that contribute to your rankings.
It’s not only important for you to rank high for your search term, but also to create trust and a sense of authority. You must appear to be the best search result, not just in a technical and content sense, but also in reality. Popularity, quality, and relevance are everything.
A lot of it comes down to link building
Links are the glue that keeps the web together. Search engines use links to determine how valuable a piece of content or a particular site is. Getting quality links has always been a great tactic if you’re serious about ranking. And who isn’t? Recently, however, some people seem to debate the relevance of links. We firmly believe in the importance of links. Of course, you need the good ones. Don’t buy stuff, and keep a close eye on where and how you’re being linked to. We’ve written several guides on how to get quality links for your site and what you shouldn’t do when link building.
Social media helps to a certain extent
By itself, social media is not essential for ranking well in search engines. It does, however, give you a unique opportunity to get in touch with customers and potential visitors.
As David Mhim wrote in his epic Ranking your local business post series: “”Being active” on social media isn’t really going to help with your local search visibility. And even if you’re wildly popular on social media, it’s unlikely that popularity will translate directly into higher local search rankings. You should primarily focus your social media efforts on engaging your customers with interesting content, promotions (if relevant), and polls and conversations that will increase their affinity for your brand. You can promote your website to a degree, but generally speaking, improvements in your local rankings will come from other factors.”
Local SEO is also off-page SEO
Local SEO is essential if you’re business is locally oriented. For local businesses, part of the off-page SEO is really in-person SEO. Word-of-mouth marketing plays a big role in getting people to your business. Not just that, happy customers can leave reviews online that Google – and other potential customers – can use to see how well you are doing.
Off-page SEO is an integral part of your SEO strategy
As we’ve shown, off-page SEO supplements on-page SEO. Both go hand in hand. You need to focus on your link building, branding and appearance efforts to make the most of your SEO. You can optimize your site all you want, but if it isn’t perceived as a quality destination for people, you won’t do well.
Read more: The ultimate guide to content SEO »
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Awesome SEO Basic, thanks for sharing these.
Yoast also help us fix most of the SEO errorts. Thanks guys.
Hey thank you for sharing this article. Being new to seo this article shares a lot of valuable information about the site optimization and off page seo. Link building being the integral part of off page seo and related articles about do’s and dont’s. thank you very much for sharing this information with beginners.
Doing off page SEO puts a lot of weight into the long term success of your website. However, you should doing by putting quality seo content out there. I’m also going though your content seo guide and looks very good. Thanks!
nice information as always. Thank You
Great blog post once again! I love your content and I use Yoast for many of our clients!
Hi,
Thank you for share this article Off-page seo optimization
Your writing skill is amazing and i have easily understand your article, so keep it up.
This was a really useful article, we’ve just launched our blog and so reading up on growing offsite SEO was much needed – time to set the wheels in motion! :-)
Very nice article Edwin on Off page seo but i would like to know more on this. Can you suggest me some best ideas on link building activities as per current trends in SEO.
It was helpful
This is really an informative article.
That’s really good article.
Thanks for sharing this great information, this guide is very helpful for newbies like me.
Off Page SEO is quiet vast and quality of off page submissions are very significant. Thanks for the great informative share.
It’s really informative blog. I was looking for something like this and finally got here. I’m using yoast seo plugins for last 5 years and recommend to my audience.
That’s great to hear, Ataul. Thanks!
Thank you for the post!
Local SEO can be useful for my sites.
Great article, especially with regards to business reviews. I recently worked with a client to help manage their Yelp account. They had a few 1 star reviews, which didn’t look great in the SERPs when you Google their business. Thankfully, after reaching out to the customers on Yelp to resolve things, it helped encourage them to remove their reviews. Now his Yelp page has improved a few extra stars and I noticed his organic SERPs improved drastically. I’m not sure if Google considers Yelp reviews in their algorithm; but it’s surely worth implementing some off-page SEO to address any negative reviews. It can only help…
Yep, reviews are a thing in this day and age. You did the right thing to try and fix bad reviews. Most people are willing to change their bad review if you listen to them and take their issues seriously. Offer a solution and ask them to update their review. It works.
Sorry for my bad English. I’m from Russia. Studying SEO. Very informative article this blog was a true revelation for me. Thank you.
No problem, your English is perfectly fine. Thanks for your comment.
thanks for this post, so how can I find some .edu and .org blog for commenting ?
Commenting does not give you quality links. Almost all sites add nofollow to links in the comments. Try to find good quality content sites in your niche and get them to use your link in their content. Here are some tips: https://yoast.com/successful-linkbuilding-strategy/
This post was really informative and easy to follow on off page SEO. I think I will focus more on local SEO for some of my sites. Thanks for sharing!
No problem, Wally!
Hi, Your article SEO basic off page seo is very useful and unique, so keep up writing, thank you for shared this article.
Does the backlink affect the performance of the website
If you mean the performance in search engines, then yes, quality links can improve your rankings.
HY YOAST THANKS FOR EXPLAINING THIS TOPIC on off page seo it helps me lot i gained some important info from here
You’re welcome, John.
This post was really informative and easy to follow on off page SEO. I think I will focus more on local SEO for some of my sites. Thanks for sharing!