A brief introduction to off-site SEO

What is off-site SEO?

Off-site or off-page SEO refers to the aspects of your SEO strategy that occur outside your page or site. For example, social media and backlinks from other sites all happen “off-site.” While these examples may sound like spam, they can actually help increase visibility among search engines by aiding them to understand the authority of your page.

Off-site SEO is one of the most critical factors in organic search rankings and has remained a top-ranking factor for over a decade.

Link building can also be considered as a strategy in off-site SEO. Link building is the process of adding external links to your website that are designed for SEO. Around 98% of SEO experts concentrate on link building.

How does link building work?

I describe links and backlinks to my students as being the “word of mouth” of the internet. This means that when someone links from their site to yours, they are vouching for you and giving you a vote of confidence.

Similarly to how “word of mouth” works, there needs to be a level of context. Therefore, the site that links to yours should connect with a decent level of relevancy; basically, these links have to make sense. For example, it wouldn’t make much sense for a site about cars to link to an accounting site. The more relevant the link is to your site, the better its impact.

Another important factor is the authority of the linking site. When a site with high authority links to your site, they are transferring their authority over to you. If a site has low authority and is linking to many other websites, then Google might mark it as toxic. If a website is marked as toxic and is linking to your site, it might negatively affect your authority.

Link building is about quality, not quantity.

How to get started with link building

Here are five steps to help you get started with link building:

1. The best link building technique is to create good and valuable content. Start by asking yourself what content will bring value and make people link to you. Then create your content accordingly.
2. Coordinate with partners, clients and experts in the industry and ask them to link back to you, usually through joint content effort.
3. Monitor your backlinks and remove toxic links on a consistent basis. I use SEMrush and Google Search Console to monitor and remove negative links.
4. Create guest blog posts on industry sites.
5. Create a successful social media strategy with link building in mind. Here, I position myself as an influencer.

Many people are afraid to get started with link building and off-site SEO but the earlier you start, the better it is for you.

To learn more about SEO, register for Tarek Riman’s upcoming workshop, “Introduction to SEO 2022.”

Want to learn more about Tarek Riman? You can find his bio here.