Fear not, I shall tell you how with the following simple procedures to get you started!

As according to Pizzi, G (2015) ‘many business owners aspiring for high search engine placement fail to realize that the most important aspects of optimizing their website actually takes place off site’ thus emphasizing the benefits that implementing off-site SEO could enforce for a business. For all those businesses who are aiming to achieve long-term high ranking search engine results, pay attention because these tips are relevant for you! Site rankings are based on SEO authority and that authority is not simply established by your website singularly. This is achieved by a combination of inbound and outbound links and how many of these sites link back to your website. Following this, continue reading for some information on how to begin utilizing off-site SEO!

So..

Social Media

Let’s begin with social media and the benefits that this provides. Social media enables high quality backlinks to be acquired from authority websites. This is possible through the mediums of Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and more. Continuing from this, community creation can be classified as another benefit of social media. The ability to create a community through your social media endeavours. Social media provides an extended online network of which you can connect, share and promote varying elements of the company to build an online reputation and many of these plaforms will presumably have links directed back to the website. See an example below of how Vodafone use links throughout their social media, namely Facebook here.

 

Blogging

Blogging is also another useful component. The creation of blogs and frequent blog entries conveying precise elements of the company prove beneficial in terms of generating consumers towards the business and if enough links are strategically spread throughout the blog, generate backlinks. Further promotion of the blog and website can be achieved through posting comments in other service-related blogs. This will enable links in the comment section which search engines will deem ‘crawlable’. For example; a blog post discussing healthy recipes could be targeted by a company like Weight Watchers commenting with a link to one of their, also healthy, recipes. However, it should be noted that all blog content should strive to be unique to avoid **duplicate content and consequently less successful SEO. See the below example of an ASOS blog in which they have a celebrity fashion icon with a link driving to a webpage (a webpage on their site – ASOS marketplace) following a fashion recommendation tied to a celebrity.

 

 

Forum Content

Forum postings provide another form of generating backlinks. This can be achieved through creating a forum or an online discussion board, sharing relevant topics with acquired followers both on and off of social media platforms. Furthermore, posting and replying to threads within other service-related pre-existing forums containing links directed back to specific areas of your business sites/social media prove beneficial. For example; a hen-party organisation could engage on wedding forums within the ‘planning’ section and reach out to brides who are to arrange their hen-parties.  However, it is important to avoid spamming. Attach links strategically and only if they link to the forum or discussion board directly and will prove helpful to the topic of discussion.

Photo Sharing

Finally, Photo sharing. Publishing and sharing a websites products and pictures and making this publicly accessible enables consumers to see and comment on this content and also make reviews where necessary. This will drive traffic to your website if links are included below said pictures. Examples of these websites include Flickr, Picasa and Photobucket.

HOWEVER..

as with everything, off-site SEO is not easy and can encounter the following problems however being aware of them and knowing how to tackle this is highly beneficial in entirely utilizing off-site SEO.

Problem number one; Flash. Although flash is becoming less common on current websites, it is still around and can hinder search engine robots attempting to index your sites content. As stated by Martin, J. (2014), ‘if the engine bots can’t read or understand your website they’ll have a hard time trying to figure out what to rank it for’. Therefore the best advice is to avoid flash on your website or use it sparingly. HTML 5, CSS3 or JavaScript can be used alternatively.

Slow Page Loads are also another issue that may be encountered. Page speed is important when attempting to attain good search rankings. If your website has many elements on it such as images and videos, this could potentially slow down your website. This can be altered by using Google’s GooglePageSpeed Tools which will help test and increase the overall speed of your site.

Last but certainly not least **duplicate content (as mentioned earlier) provides an issue for companies. According to moz.com (2015) the below problems are faced with duplicate content.

1. Search engines don’t know which version(s) to include/exclude from their indices
2. Search engines don’t know whether to direct the link metrics (trust, authority, anchor text)to one page, or keep it separated between multiple versions
3. Search engines don’t know which version(s) to rank for query results

When duplicate content is present, site owners suffer rankings and traffic losses, and search engines provide less relevant results. Martin J. (2014) however provide the remedy of crawling your site looking for duplications and apply “crawl directives” to inform Google of the relative value of multiple URLs, Stricker says. You can use “robots.txt” (a file that allows you to control how Google’s bots crawl and index your public Web pages) to tell Google the specific folders and directories that are not worth crawling.

Now that we have cleared that up, happy off site seo-ing!

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 References

Moz.com (2015). Duplicate Content – SEO Best Practices – Moz. [online] Moz.com. Available at: http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content [Accessed 31 Mar. 2015].

Martin, J. (2014). Top 10 Technical SEO Issues (and How to Fix Them). [online] www.cio.com. Available at: http://www.cio.com/article/2376266/internet/top-10-technical-seo-issues–and-how-to-fix-them-.html [Accessed 31 Mar. 2015].

Pizzi, G. (2015). What is Off-Site SEO?. [online] www.audiologydesign.com. Available at: http://www.audiologydesign.com/what-is-off-site-seo/ [Accessed 31 Mar. 2015].