Over time, businesses have learned why they need to engage in search engine optimization to beat out the competition.
You can find a large volume of content out on the web about keywords, techniques, and SEO strategy, and the range of opinions has made managing SEO at a tactical level all the more confusing.
But with all the advice and chatter from SEO people, there is one thing that’s very clear: you need to rank high on SERPs if you want to maximize traffic and visits to your website.
We all want to rank higher, especially for businesses. Landing atop the SERPs is the payoff for all of your hard work, for your money invested, and for the quality of your overall on-page and off-page SEO strategies.
Basically, it’s safe to say that tons of businesses have nearly perfected and have put in place their SEO campaigns. Their websites have already been optimized and are now search engine friendly.
A lot of people think that SEO is really just about keyword research, and optimizing the web content on the page to target those same keywords – in the meta tag and descriptions, image and URLs.
Realistically, that is only one piece of the total game. It’s also important to focus on optimizing your SEO outside the webpage itself. This is what we have collectively named “off-site SEO.”
Off-site search engine optimization takes a lot of effort over time. It indicates how users or searchers perceive a website.
When we find a site full of unique and useful information, it is more likely that we will share it with our contacts on social media – we follow it, share it, bookmark it or mention it in forums or discussions.
Many in the SEO industry will attest to the fact that off-site SEO strategy is paramount to increasing rankings for a website.
Enjoy the following tips I offer you for managing your off-site SEO efforts:
1. Actively Participate on Social Networking Sites
Start off by signing up and creating a profile on the most used social media platforms. This is an important step for promoting and building a brand’s reputation on the internet.
Even more valuable is the ability to reach a wider target audience and interact with friends, fans, prospects, and customers.
Search Engine crawlers will take notice of likes, shares, and follower counts, tweets or comments sharing materials from your site, and reviews about your products or website.
All of these activities play into where you are indexed and ranked, and can lead to enhanced placement in the SERPs.
2. Have a Link Building Strategy Up Front
This is one of the most important elements of SEO, and an area that cannot be underemphasized. Try to get links from high domain authority websites and / or sites that cover topics which are the most relevant to your brand.
Domain authority and relevance of subject matter both come into play when Google and the other search engines are deciding what is and is not a good link.
Be sure to pursue links which can be shared. If more people share your content and the content linking to it, search engines will be more likely to conclude that your site provides quality information, and that it is a credible source which deserves to be ranked higher.
Both of these factors help improve your overall authority, which in turn will help you rank better.
Some other more controversial link building techniques are link baiting and link exchange. Link baiting means you are creating materials that are “link-worthy.”
When you produce content that is unique and noteworthy, people will be more likely to link to that content.
Link exchange is a simple concept, of basically exchanging links with niche-relevant websites so you can both benefit from increased traffic and better rankings.
[Editor’s Note: both of these techniques can work, but can also come with risk. Be sure to use both approaches with discretion]
3. Generate Great Blog Content and Promote It
Blog posting is one of the best way to promote a website, as content marketing has truly become the crux of a world class inbound marketing strategy.
Your brand will benefit greatly if you take time to write high-quality and education content, and it is the most likely to keep customers and prospects coming back to your website again and again.
Great topics will talk about your brand or main area of expertise. Frequency of posting will also encourage visitors to come back multiple times.
Even better, frequently publishing content will cause more frequent search engines crawling and indexing of your website. This is obviously beneficial in that it can result in better and better ranking over time.
You can even generate modified versions of your own blog content for guest posting to other websites, which almost always comes with links back to your website in the signature box or the content itself.
After much confusion about guest posting a year or two ago, this tactic still stands as one of the best and most commonly used ways of generating value via off-site SEO.
Feature image credit: Wikimedia Commons, License: CC BY (commercial reuse with modification)
Disclaimer: The views and opinions stated in this post are that of the author, and Return On Now may or may not agree with any or all of the commentary.
Eve Haugen
Latest posts by Eve Haugen (see all)
- How to Attract Visitors to Your Website - July 10, 2015
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