If you are a blogger who wants to improve your site’s ranking on Google and drive organic traffic to your business, you’ll need to consider more than just your on-page SEO strategies. You should seriously consider off-page SEO, too!
Off-page SEO is one of the most important components of a good search engine optimization plan. The benefits of using off-page tactics, how off-page works, and how to make your website more visible externally will all be discussed in this guide to off-page SEO for bloggers!
What is Off-Page SEO?
Off-page SEO takes place outside of a website to improve the site’s search engine rankings. Building quality backlinks, boosting branded media mentions, and increasing interaction and shares on social media are all examples of off-page SEO tactics that are commonly used by professional bloggers.
Off-page SEO refers to anything you do on the internet, beyond your website to convince search engines to see your website/blog as authoritative and worthy of trust.
Off-Page SEO Factors
There are many forms of off-page SEO to consider. These may include:
Link Building
Building one-way connections (sometimes known as “backlinks”) to a website is known as link building. A PageRank powerhouse page linked to you? This will have a big influence on your rankings.
Years of research have demonstrated that the authority of the page linking to you is crucial. Because authoritative links boost your site’s authority (also known as PageRank).
Mix of Dofollow and Nofollow Links is Best
Links are the means through which search engine algorithms determine the existence of relationships between web pages. They navigate from one website to another using “Dofollow” links, rather than “Nofollow” ones, which aren’t as important.
However, “nofollow” links can still help your SEO. An increase in the number of high-quality external links pointing to your website results in an increase in traffic – not just from readers who click on the links, but also from search engines.
A “dofollow” link is certainly ideal, and your website will get them over time as long as you’re putting out high-quality content.
In the simplest terms, dofollow is the default status of a link. Links from blog comments, website forums, Facebook, and similar are often “nofollow,” so don’t spend too much of your time writing comments on blogs.
For any given website, it is normal for it to have a mixture of “Nofollow” and “Dofollow” links going to it. In reality, Google’s Penguin update identified that having all “Dofollow” links on a page was suspect and penalized the website accordingly. As a result, it is preferable to have a mix of both.
Social Media
As we’ve seen, social media has no direct influence on SEO, but the social signals (such as likes, shares, and comments) created by people who share your material on social media platforms help establish credibility and confidence in your blog’s brand. I did see an increase in the rankings of one of my blog posts after a pin I created went viral on Pinterest. So don’t discount social media at all!
Interact on Forums
Commenting in the forum solely for the purpose of backlinks is not a smart strategy. Adding a link is beneficial only when relevant to the topic and enriches the dialogue. Some forums give “dofollow” backlinks making them valuable for SEO. However, most have “nofollow” backlinks which are also valuable as you may earn clicks for your site, but only if the response that you give on the forum is relevant and is able to satisfy the problem. Tread with caution!
Comment on Blogs
Blog commenting used to be a very good technique to earn backlinks, but not anymore. Most bloggers establish nofollow links in comments. Readers can still click the link and reach your site.
That doesn’t imply you shouldn’t comment on blogs, merely that those connections are less important for SEO. Google and other search engines rarely trust links from blog commenters. However, users may do so.
Plus, once I left a comment on a blog, and she later included me in one of her weekly “link roundup” posts with different blog posts she recommended reading. So I got a backlink from her without intending to! Blog post comments aren’t a total waste of time if you do them strategically.
Guest Posts
If you’re disappointed with the amount of traffic coming to your site, ask yourself if it’s worth spending more time on guest posting.
If you’re smart and know your subject, the response should be yes. Despite some doubts about the strategy’s sustainability, guest posting is still one of the finest methods to increase your following and drive traffic to your site.
Guest posts involve writing a blog post as an Author for another website that has more authority than you.
With any luck, you’ll get a dofollow backlink, and gain some new readers!
The smartest way to do guest posting is to direct the blog’s readers to an email collection form on your website so you can keep those readers around for the future.
Media Mentions
There are a hundred reasons why Google values brand mentions and citations. All of this means that if it’s significant for Google, it’s vital for SEO.
Changing anchor text and links is simple. Sometimes the links might go to a site completely unrelated to the originating site. Brand mentions, on the other hand, are more difficult to control since they must be relevant and in context to be smoothly integrated into the content.
If you have any questions about off-page SEO, leave me a comment below and I’ll be happy to get back to you soon!