What is off-page optimisation?

The term ‘off-page optimisation’ refers to all the actions which can be taken outside of the specific website in order to increase its position in search rankings. These are measures which assist with creating as many high-quality backlinks (incoming links) as possible.

Optimising for off-site ranking factors (which is another term of off-page ranking factors) involves refining search engine as well as user perception of a website’s

• Popularity,
• Relevance,
• Trustworthiness, and
• Authority.

This is accomplished by other reputable places on the Internet (pages, sites, people, etc.) linking to or promoting your website, and effectively “vouching” for the quality of your content.

Getting good quality backlinks

There are many ways to increase the number of good-quality links pointing to your site. These include soliciting links from sites that you already have an existing partnership with (such as your customers or vendors), distributing content that then links back to your site and submitting your site to related directories.

Partner linking

Contact your business partners, customers, clietns, vendors or suppliers and ask them to link back to your site under their resources section. This will add value to their visitors.

Content distribution

Submit content and articles to distributors who publish or republish content across content networks. Add a link back to your website to end off the piece of content.

Content distributors help to increase exposure about your company, increase traffic by adding your website URL to all submitted content and increase brand awareness. Inbound links also help to increase the credibility of your website in the eyes of search engines.

Open source and business directories

Add your website to network directories as well as other local business directories .

Blog indexing

Submitting your company blog to blog directories creates an inbound link back to your site if your blog is contained on the same domain as your website. In addition, submitting content to other blogs – with a link back to yourwebsite – also helps with inbound linking that then impacts hyour site’s seach engine rankings and visibility.

Tools and widgets

Creating a useful tool or widget that contains a link back to your site when it’s installed on someone else’s site is a good way of increasing inbound link value for your own website.

Social media sites

Social media sites – such as StumbleUpon, Facebook and MyYahoo – enable you to create a profile on their site, post links and add content. You gain brand awareness and links back to your website plus you can gain a large online following so spreading your website and brand virally through the web.

While links from publicy accessible pages such as a Facebook Page will have link value note that many links from social media sites such as Twitter have ‘no follow’ tags attached which tells search engines not to assign link value to the ddesgination page. Most social bookmarketing sites also have ‘no follow’ attributes assigned to outgoing links but they can still help to drive traffic to your site.

If you create backlinks in specific places that your target audience is in, the better the chance is of them following this link to your site.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

If you want to learn more about SEO and web analytics when you need to do our SEO and Web Analytics Course. For more information, please follow this link.