13 Best Off Page Methods You Must Know

13 Best Off Page Methods You Must Know

Link Building

Link building is the most popular and effective off-Page SEO method.  Basically by building external links to your website, you are trying to gather as many ‘votes’ as you can, so that you can bypass your competitors and rank higher.

For example, if someone likes this article and references it from his/her website or blog, then this is like telling search engines that this page has good information.

Over the years webmasters have been trying to build links to their websites to get higher rankings and they ‘invented’ a number of ways to increase link count.

The most popular ways were:

1. Social Bookmarking: Social bookmarking sites are one of the best platforms to promote your website. When you bookmark your webpage or blog post on popular social bookmarking websites, you gain high traffic to your webpage or blog.

Check Free High PR Social Bookmarking Sites:

Free Bookmarking Sites List

2. Social Media - Social media is part of ‘off-site SEO’ and if you think about it, it’s also a form of link building. It should be noted that almost all of the links you get from social media sites are “nofollow” but this does not mean that they do not have any value.

Social Media mentions are gaining ground as ranking factors and proper configuration of social media profiles can also boost SEO.

Free Social Media Sites

3. Blog Directories – Directory Submission is constantly working to build quality back links. Choose an effective directory and select a proper category. It takes quite some time to deliver good results, but these results stand out over a longer time period.

Free Directory Submission Sites List

4. Forum Signatures – Many people were commenting on forums for the sole purpose of getting a link back to their website (they included the links in their signature).

Participate in search forums which are related to your website and business and make a connection with that community. Reply to threads, answer people’s questions and give your suggestions and advice. Make use of “Do-Follow” forums.

Free High PR Fourm Submission Sites

5. Article Submission – By publishing your articles in article directories you could get a link (or 2) back to your website. Some article directories accepted only unique content while other directories accepted anything from spin articles to already published articles.

Submit your articles in a high PR article submission directory. You can also give links to your website. Make sure your content is unique and of high quality. Low quality content and content that has more keyword stuffing might get rejected. Choose the correct category and give a good title to your content.

Free Article Submission Sites

6. Question and Answer- One of the best ways you can get high traffic is from question and answer websites. Join high PR question and answer sites and search for questions related to your business, blog or website and give clear answers to these questions. Give a link to your website which will help in bringing you more visibility.

Free High PR Question and Answer Sites

 7. Video Submission - If you want to make your videos popular, head to popular video submission sites. Give a proper title, description, tags and reference links. It is one of the more popular ways to get quality back links because all video submission websites have high PR.

Free High PR Video Submission Sites

 8. Infographics Submission - Make creative infographics. These days, infographics are getting popular on the internet. Submit your infographics on infographics submission websites and give reference links to your webpage or blog. The image sizes differ with different websites.

Free High PR Inforgraphic Sharing Sites

9. Document Sharing - Create attractive documents relating to your business or blog. The documents should have unique content and should be in either pdf or ppt formats. Submit these documents in the document sharing websites.

 Free High PR Document Sharing Sites

10. PPT Submission - PowerPoint submission is an effective online marketing tactic to attract targeted traffic, get quality inbound links and maximize your site’s visibility in major search engines. 

Free High PR PPT Sharing Sites

11. Image Submission- Share your photos on popular image submission websites. Before submitting your images please optimize them with the correct URL and title tag. Before submitting your images, check if they have a proper title, description and tags.

Free High PR Image Sharing Sites

12. Shared Content Directories – Websites like hubpages and infobarrel allowed you to publish content and in return you could add a couple of links pointing to your websites.

13. Link exchange schemes – Instead of trying to publish content you could get in touch with other webmasters and exchange links. In other words, I could link your website from mine and you could do the same.

Conclusion

Off-page SEO is as important as on-site SEO. If you want your SEO campaigns to be successful you have to do both. When thinking about link building don’t take the easy way, but try to get links from hard-to-get places. The more difficult is to get a link, the more value it has.

In the past, you could easily get thousands of links and rank higher but nowadays you have to do more than that.  My advice is to forget about link building all together and put all your efforts in making a great website, promote it correctlyand everything else will follow.

Link Building

Link building is the most popular and effective off-Page SEO method.  Basically by building external links to your website, you are trying to gather as many ‘votes’ as you can, so that you can bypass your competitors and rank higher.

For example, if someone likes this article and references it from his/her website or blog, then this is like telling search engines that this page has good information.

Over the years webmasters have been trying to build links to their websites to get higher rankings and they ‘invented’ a number of ways to increase link count. The most popular ways were:

Blog Directories – something like yellow pages but each entry had a link pointing to a website.

Forum Signatures – Many people were commenting on forums for the sole purpose of getting a link back to their website (they included the links in their signature).

Comment link – The same concept as forum signatures where you would comment on some other website or blog in order to get a link back. Even worse, instead of using your real name you could use keywords so instead of writing ‘comment by Alex Chris’,  you wrote ‘comment by How to lose weight’.

Article Directories – By publishing your articles in article directories you could get a link (or 2) back to your website. Some article directories accepted only unique content while other directories accepted anything from spin articles to already published articles.

Shared Content Directories – Websites like hubpages and infobarrel allowed you to publish content and in return you could add a couple of links pointing to your websites.

Link exchange schemes – Instead of trying to publish content you could get in touch with other webmasters and exchange links. In other words, I could link your website from mine and you could do the same.

What is a good link?

So, if the above links are not useful, what is a good link?

First, you should understand that link building it’s not only a matter of quantity but it is a matter of quality as well.

In other words, it no longer matters how many links are pointing to your website but it is more important from where these links are coming.

For example, a link from a normal blog does not have the same ‘weight’ as a link from New York Times or a link from Matt Cutts blog (former head of Google Quality team) is not the same as a link from my blog.

The obvious question is, how to you get these links?

If you ask Google they will tell you that any links pointing to your website has to be natural links. Natural links are exactly what their name implies. A website owner or blogger likes another website or blog and naturally adds a link to his/her blog.

Does this happen in reality or is it another myth?

It certainly does but you have to try really hard to get to this point. Take for example this blog, there are many incoming links because other webmasters find the content interesting and I also link to other sites in my articles because I find their content interesting and want to inform my readers about it.

This is natural link building, a link has more value from the reader’s’ point of view rather than the search engine’s point of view.

The best way to attract links is to publish link worthy content that other people would like to link to.

If natural links are what I have just described above, in which category do all other links belong?

They belong in the category of artificial links and by adopting such techniques you increase the risk for getting a manual or algorithmic penalty by Google.

Is guest blogging a valid way to build links?

Guest posting can be a valid way to get links back to your website provided that you don’t do it just for links and that you don’t overdo it. You can read these 2 articles to get a complete picture as to when to accept guest posts on your blog and when to guest post on other blogs.

Social Media

Social media is part of ‘off-site SEO’ and if you think about it, it’s also a form of link building. It should be noted that almost all of the links you get from social media sites are “nofollow” but this does not mean that they do not have any value.

Social Media mentions are gaining ground as ranking factors and proper configuration of social media profiles can also boost SEO.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is not as popular as it used to be in the past but it is still a good way to get traffic to your website. Depending on your niche you can find web sites like reddit.com, stumbleupon.com, scoop.it and delicious.com (to name a few) to promote your content.

Conclusion

Off-page SEO is as important as on-site SEO. If you want your SEO campaigns to be successful you have to do both. When thinking about link building don’t take the easy way, but try to get links from hard-to-get places. The more difficult is to get a link, the more value it has.

In the past, you could easily get thousands of links and rank higher but nowadays you have to do more than that.  My advice is to forget about link building all together and put all your efforts in making a great website, promote it correctlyand everything else will follow.