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Best Off-Page SEO Practices

Best Off-Page SEO PracticesA great way to increase your chances of generating more traffic and better ranking is by practicing off-page SEO. While most people like to keep their readers on their own website, it’s just as important to have them go off-page and explore other content. Understandably that sounds like a bad idea; why would you want people to leave your website?

Off-page SEO basically gives Google an idea of what other people think about your website. In order for you to grow as a brand or website, people need to share your content outside of your website. Off-page SEO can increase your ranking, PageRank, and give your website more exposure.

Here are a Few Tips for the Best Off-Page SEO Practices

Link Building

There’s a reason that link building is the most talked about practice for off-page SEO; it works. Natural or organic links from reputable and like-minded websites will give Google the sense that you are a trustworthy website.

Google uses a variety of factors when determining how to rank a certain website or blog. While Google doesn’t outright state their secret ranking algorithm, it does hand out plenty of information on how to create relevant material. Of those hundreds of factors, the ones that top the list are the quality and number of links coming to your website or blog.

Link building can be an arduous process, which is why it’s very difficult to find yourself on the first page of Google. However, despite the effort, the reward of getting quality links to your website is worth the process.

In order to find yourself on authority sites such as The New York Times, CNN, and LinkedIn, you have to consistently show quality content. The content you produce should be of equal quality to those authority sites you are trying to reach.

LinkedIn has the ability for your content reach a wider audience much faster. With their pulse posts you are able to write content that has the possibility of reaching 433 million users. This is a great way to capitalize on LinkedIn as a vehicle for off-page SEO link building.

Broken Link Building

One method of gaining more off-page traction is broken link building. This is a great way to improve your natural link building that not too many people take advantage of.

Basically, what broken link building boils down to is fixing said broken link. You can do this by running a backlink analysis on a website relevant to the content you write about, find a broken link within that analysis and let the owner know about their broken link.

By helping the owner know about that broken link, they might help out and offer to include a link to your website as a replacement link. This is great simple way to increase your off-page SEO without having to do a ton of legwork.

Social Media

Another key ingredient to off-page SEO is a website’s social media presence. Social media has a direct impact on your websites exposure. An important aspect of what Google deems “quality content” is how much that content is shared.

Make sure you grow your social media outlets with a target audience in mind. For example, if you want to give nutrition advice you should be targeting people on Facebook whose interests include healthy eating, workout tips, and outdoor activities.

By staying active on certain pages that are relevant to your own and staying in the public eye, people from other pages will start to take notice of you and your content. In order to target people you need to subtly attract people to your website through different comment sections and forums.

It’s vital that you are actively using social media; otherwise your content won’t reach the people you want. Make sure you are commenting on message boards and responding to people’s comments or reviews. If you have a lot of great content but nobody following you or liking your page, you might as well be writing on a word document.

Distribution of Infographics

Sometimes visualizing a concept is better than reading about a concept. This is where infographics come in handy. An infographic is simply a representation of information, data, or knowledge that is presented as a graphic visual. As a society that continues to be more visual, infographics remain prevalent for spreading information. This is a great tool for off-page SEO because it gives you a better chance to go viral.

The reason that infographics can go viral faster is because of social media platforms like Twitter or Instagram. On both platforms, you’re only given a limited number of characters. This makes sharing pictures a lot more practical; it’s easier for people to look and quickly access information, where a 1,000+word article takes more time to read.

Infographics gives your readers a faster way to get familiar with your content. It can also provide an entryway to other areas of your website. Off-page SEO thrives only when others promote your brand, and infographics generate almost 40% more backlinks than a normal blog post. This gives your website an even better opportunity of being ranked higher as well as being seen more.

Quality Content is Critical

As I’ve stated above, when working on off-page SEO it’s critical that you are creating quality content. Obviously this is for your own website, but it also includes the websites that you link to.

If your website visitors think your content is useless to them they won’t be back. If you link them to a site with mediocre or unrelated content they may think less of you, too, and won’t visit again.

Make sure you are vigilant and thorough in your research; otherwise you will find yourself stuck at a low ranking.

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How To Promote Website Content Through Social Media

Promote content through social media

A great way to promote website content is through social media, but without a clear direction it can get fairly difficult.A great way to promote website content is through social media, but without a clear direction it can get fairly difficult.

With the abundance of social media content in today’s environment, it’s easy to get lost in the mix.

While social media is a great tool to promote your brand and getting your name out there, it can be difficult to do when millions of others are trying to do the same thing.

In a society driven by media, we need to figure out a way to cut through the noise. Noise in the social media sense is how much consumption is happening every 60 seconds. For example, every minute there are 2.78 million video views on YouTube and 347,222 tweets. With all that content out there it may seem daunting to gain notoriety and attention.

There are varying ways, as a brand, to cut through that noise to reach your target audience.

Ways to Promote Website Content Through Social Media

Using Visuals

One organic way to promote website content through social media is by using visual components.

If you’re going after a group of people who might be more visually inclined, make sure to include more media content than worded stories. Just because you’re trying to tell a story doesn’t necessarily mean you have to write it. Using tools like infographics and Prezi are a great way to go about presenting these visuals.

Think about incorporating images for each main point in your article. This will give your content a better chance of being shared on different social media platforms.

Infographics are a great example of this. An infographic is a graphic visual image such as a chart or diagram used to represent information or data. Infographics are an incredibly efficient way to show data and how it’s applicable.

You’ve heard of the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words.” In 2016 it’s “a good infographic is worth a thousand words.”

Prezi gives you the ability to tell a story or present content in a unique manner that can captivate someone. Both have mobile capability, therefore allowing you to better reach your social media audience and promote your content.

The Art of Creating a Headline

Another organic way to promote your content is simply by creating impactful headlines.

“On the average, five times as many people
read the headlines as read the body copy.”

David Ogilvy, “The Father of Advertising”

So why are headlines so important? It’s because they’re the first lines of your copy that customers read. They create an initial impression that either draws readers in or pushes them away.

You want to make sure the headline is grabbing people’s attention. With that in mind, you need to create a title with the purpose of having it be shared on social media.

4 U’s of Headline Writing

The 4 U’s of Headline Writing are well known throughout the advertising and copywriting worlds.

1 Your headline should convey a sense of urgency

2 Your headline should be unique

3 Your headline should be ultra-specific

4 Your headline should be useful

Twitter

One way to use twitter as a simple brand promotion is by pinning a tweet on your timeline. You can have the tweet be a link to your website; since it’s pinned, it will stay at the top of your timeline. This is an effective way to manipulate a person’s attention to what you want them to see.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn allows you to promote your website content through your profile. The Experience section of your LinkedIn profile allows you to add content about your past or present positions. You can upload graphics and link videos, add volunteer experiences and projects. All of this allows you to add searchable content to the Internet using keywords relevant to your business while promoting yourself in a more professional social media setting.

Paid Advertising

In addition to having a strong organic promotion of content, there needs to be a mixture of paid advertising as well. This is because less than 1% of organic social media gets any kind of engagement, making it hard to get noticed solely through organic methods.

One example of paid advertising is the pay to play method. This is the concept of paying social media platforms to promote your content. This gives your content a spot in the news feeds of social media users, which guarantees visibility from a target audience.

Using Facebook advertising is an excellent way to pay to promote through social media. In a test done by socialmediaexaminer.com, 90% of marketers reportedly use Facebook ads opposed to the second most LinkedIn (20%). This is because Facebook has such a large audience and there are an incredible amount of niche pages and audiences that make it more practical to use. While LinkedIn attracts more professional audiences, Facebook has the range of old and young demographics who express their likes and dislikes much more prevalently.

High Quality Content

Both through paid and organic advertising the point remains the same: deliver your message effectively and concisely. Make sure your content is of high quality and not confusing or uninformative.

You need to ensure your brand is being promoted in a captivating way so as to ensure you’re grabbing the audiences’ attention quickly. People are used to scrolling through newsfeeds so fast that they hardly take the time to stop and read what people are actually writing.

That’s why you need to make sure you’re giving the target audience compelling content that tells a story. If your advertisement comes across as, well, an advertisement, people will be less likely to stop and read what you have to say. People want to know how they can relate to a product or brand, and how it may influence their daily lives.

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