Off-Page SEO: Building Links and Popularity
LUSO.us: Off-page SEO is search engine optimization efforts from outside the website.
Continuing the post about 7 simple steps of SEO techniques to make your website able to compete on the first page of google, now I continue to step 5.
For the previous technique in the fourth stage, you can read “Content Marketing As The Main Part of an SEO Strategy”
Optimizing from within the website, or on-page SEO alone is often not enough to rank high in search results. Especially for new websites that do not yet have an audience, unless the keyword competition is quite low.
Why backlinks are so important
To understand the importance of off-page SEO, I will explain a little about the relationship between search engines and links.
Search engines like Google have a bot whose job is to crawl the internet. Google’s crawler is called Googlebot
Googlebot moves from website to website through the links listed on every page of the website. From the data collected by Googlebot, an index and ranking order of websites is compiled.
Because Googlebot uses links as its navigation, websites that have external links will get high priority. The more and higher the quality of the links, the better the ranking of the website.
This is why links from other websites (backlinks) play an important role in SEO.
Wrong link building strategy
Off-page SEO has a dark side to it.
There are people who want to increase their website rankings but are too lazy to create quality content and do marketing, instead, they only rely on link building.
Link building is supporting website content, without having good content, you should not do link building. Because apart from being useless, the result can be a punishment from Google.
A good link-building process is always related to marketing and content marketing. Not through spamming and the use of bots or automation software.
There are several forms of backlinks that are not liked by search engines because they are often misused.
Here are some of them:
1. Exchange links.
A very popular method in the mid to late 2000s, direct link exchange does not provide positive benefits anymore.
2. Buy links & use backlink services.
Buying links is likely to increase rankings quickly but usually will not last long because you will be penalized by Google.
3. Comment on blogs & forums.
The links you get from comments on blogs don’t do much, nor do forums. But both are often a land of spam.
4. Auto-approve links.
All forms of links are not through the moderation of the website owner. This means that the link immediately appears when you enter your website address.
5. Using bot software.
There are several software/tools that can be used to get links automatically, but the links you get are of low quality and can actually damage the website.
6. Private Blog Network.
This means a collection of blogs owned by 1 person that only functions as a backlink field to their main website. Google actively penalizes blog networks like this.
7. Spam.
In any form, spamming techniques will not provide positive benefits for you.
Links obtained by the methods above are usually of low quality. The maximum you can get is a high ranking in the short term, then penalized by Google.
Therefore it is better to avoid this kind of technique.
As with on-page SEO, quality matters a lot. Even off-page SEO is more sensitive to quality.
It means like this.
Even if you have a good website and content, if you do off-page optimization that violates the above technique, you will not escape punishment.
Because of the importance of link building, further guidelines for getting quality links will be discussed in the next chapter.
The relationship between content and backlinks
Content = on-page, backlinks = off-page. Is there a relationship between content and backlinks?
Very there. Here’s a quote from Bing.
If the value that you have worked so hard to instill in your site is evident to them, they will assist their own customers by linking back to your site. That, my friend, is the essence of link building.
It roughly means something like this,
If your website does have value (value) and this value is visible to others, then they will be happy to provide a link to you. This is the essence of link building.
To provide value, then you must have quality content. To show this value to others, you have to do content marketing.
So content marketing is the main backlink “source” for you.
Social media and off-page SEO
The effect of social media on SEO is an endless debate.
Some people say it has an effect, some say only Google+ has an effect, the rest say it has no effect at all.
So is social media marketing really important?
Urgent.
Although it has nothing to do with SEO. Social media is one of the best ways to introduce your website to people.
As discussed earlier, in addition to having quality content you must also show this content to others. Therefore, social media is the right place for this.
When other people see your content and are interested, they may come back to recommend you to others with shares, likes, and so on.
This is why you must be active on social media to market your website.
Off-page SEO ranking factors
Off-page SEO is a website popularity game. In determining the popularity of a website, Google uses various factors.
We already know that backlinks are a major factor in off-page SEO. But not just any backlink has a positive impact.
The following are factors that determine ranking from outside the website.
1. Quality of backlinks
Quality backlinks have a much stronger impact than non-quality backlinks. But what determines the quality of backlinks?
- Website reputation
- Website active
- Similarity of topics
- Placement of backlinks on the website
- Dofollow & Nofollow
- common language
- Backlink Age
Regarding placement, the best quality backlinks are placed within the text. The term contextual link.
This is because Google reads what the text surrounding the link contains and decides in what context the link is placed. As a result, your website will get points for these keywords.
2. Anchor text in backlinks
Anchor text used in links is read by search engines as keywords. Your website gets extra points in the text used as anchors.
However, the use of the same anchor over and over again will not have a positive impact.
You need to know if on 1 page there are 2 links to your website and both have different anchors, then Google uses the first anchor.
3. Number of backlinks
The more backlinks you get, the better.
But not only that.
Quantity must go hand in hand with quality. If you only get backlinks from websites that do not have a reputation, this does not count as a positive factor.
4. Diversity of backlinks
There are several types of backlinks, one of which was mentioned earlier, namely contextual links. Besides that, there are more such as blog comments, profiles, bios, widgets, advertorials, directories, etc.
Too much use of one type of backlink will not provide the optimal effect.
Logically, if we get backlinks naturally, the types of backlinks will vary. This is why search engines use diversity as a factor.
5. Social reputation
Google can understand the sentiment in each comment. This means that every time your website appears and then negative comments from other people appear, it will have a bad impact.
And vice versa with the positive sentiment that has a positive impact.
6. Social activities
Websites that are active on social websites such as social media and social networks are popular.
One of the social activities of a website can be seen by measuring the number of shares on social networks. But remember again with positive and negative sentiments.
7. User personal factors
Since Google implements personalized search, search results in the same keyword can be different for each Google account.
This is influenced by several factors such as:
- Have users ever visited a website?
- Level of user satisfaction with a website
- Country and language
- Has a website ever been shared by a friend?
You need to know that search engines never issue an official list of factors that affect rankings, therefore the above factors are obtained empirically.