Off-site SEO
Just as someone’s real-life popularity is determined by what others think of them, a webpage’s popularity is determined by what other webpages think of their content. Off-site SEO (also called Off-page SEO) refers to external factors that influence organic rankings, such as backlinks and social shares.
If many other webpages link to a particular webpage, such links serve as a signal that the content on that page is trustworthy. The goal of off-site SEO is to have as many reputable websites as possible link to one’s webpage in a natural, organic way (such as citations for the reader’s reference).
There are 6 total metrics used to determine a webpage’s popularity. These metrics include:
- Total number of backlinks. The more webpages that cite a webpage, the more popular the search engines consider that page to be.
- Backlinks from related websites. Not all endorsements have the same value. When a webpage gets links from websites within the same industry, they’re considered expert endorsements.
- Anchor text. Anchor text is the visible,clickable text in a hyperlink. If the anchor text of the backlinks to a page uses relevant keywords, the value of these endorsements increase.
- Link freshness. A high-quality webpage will continue to receive new backlinks. If a page stops generating new backlinks, the search engine assumes the page’s content is no longer relevant or valuable to readers.
- Link diversity. Search engines want to see a page’s backlinks coming from a variety of different domains with different IP addresses.
- Social sharing. If people are sharing links to a webpage through social media, the webpage can see positive effects to their rankings.
Off-site SEO success will only come after much hard work. The ultimate goal would be to create a website with compelling content that, without any extra effort, generated millions of backlinks from diverse, reputable websites with relevant anchor text. But, as you would expect, this is very hard to do. Earning high quality backlinks for your website will require a lot of work.
If you’d like ideas on how to generate more on-site and off-site SEO, contact our SEO experts today!