When you’re trying to rank a website, you’ll need off page SEO to do just this, so don’t think that backlinks are a bad thing or something that doesn’t matter. In fact, off page SEO is one of the most critical things to ranking a website in the long run because they pass authority to your pages and that authority helps you go up the rankings. Yes, on page SEO is also needed, but some websites are ranking solely because of their off page SEO tactics, which shows how important it is.

Off page optimization needs to be planned out before you even think about placing that first backlink. You need a gameplan before you start your backlink journey. Otherwise, you’ll get bad links and might obtain a penalty from Google.

It’s rather easy to get lousy backlinks, and it’s much more challenging to get the right backlinks with high authority, but don’t worry, SEO is a long game to play, and you won’t have any instant gratification from it. The work you do over the next few months, or years, will compile so you want to do it all right from the start so you’re building up authority links and not garbage work that will have to be disavowed later on.

Building Quality Backlinks

This isn’t always the easiest, or cheapest, thing to do when it comes to link building because not everyone will want your link on their website. Another reason this is difficult is because you will want to stick within your niche and only get links from it or ones that are closely related. If you have a car website, then you’ll want backlinks from car associated blogs, even motorcycle websites, but you’ll never want to reach out to someone that has a crafts website or something like a dog grooming service because those links won’t help.

Think “relevance” when you’re building your backlinks. Think “Is this backlink going to be relevant to the readers on that website or will they ignore it?” and if you can say it’s relevant, without trying to convince yourself it is, then it’s likely an excellent place to put a backlink if possible. No one wants to be browsing through their favorite dog blog and see a link to your automotive website; it just doesn’t make sense, so don’t do that.

Branding Is Important

When you’re building your links, you will want to use your domain name here and there because it will help with branding. It will also help with a varied anchor text, so you aren’t always having your keywords show up as the main hyperlink.

Using your domain name, without the http://www or .com, will help you get noticed quicker over time because people will think, “Oh, I remember this website from when I was browsing here last week. Let’s click through!” and that’s always a good thing.

Think about how email marketing works; people need to see an email on an average of 6 times before they take action. The same goes with branding and link placements, so be sure to use your domain/business name as your anchor text every once in a while. Also, Google will love it, as well!

When you’re building your links, you will want to use your domain name here and there because it will help with branding. It will also help with a varied anchor text, so you aren’t always having your keywords show up as the main hyperlink.

Content Is King

This has been a pretty solid law over the last ten years online so you should stick to it. When writing content, you want it to be informative, readable, and unique to the people reading it like it as much as Google will. It doesn’t matter if you’re posting on a 3rd party website as a guest poster or you’re putting this content on your website, it needs to be high quality to give you the best chances to rank for your desired keywords.

Some people post 300-400 word articles and think they’re going to rank for challenging keywords if they do the proper off page SEO, but that’s just no the case. What you’ll need to do is write 1,500+ words of content for each of the guest posts, or related links, if you want to rank easier. You’ll also have to aim all of these high quality articles or guest post backlinks at an even better article on your website. Think of it this way; you’ll be writing at least 10,000 words of content get higher rankings for a tough keyword. You will be writing 2,000+ words just for your website, and the rest of the material will go on high DA websites related to your own and are accepting your posts. Do this, and you will eventually rank for all of your keywords, but it takes a lot of time and effort so be ready to work.

Avoiding SEO Software

When the internet was born, people were ranking for tough keywords, and all they were doing was running some quick setup software they coded that placed millions of backlinks all over the internet. Today you can’t do any of that if you want to even rank for easy keywords and this is because the search algorithms are far more advanced than when the search engines went live.

SEO software sales pages are very enticing, and they’re written that way to get you to pay them, but in the end, the software won’t help you do more than just basic research. If you’re researching by using a piece of SEO software, you’re not using it for its intended purposes, and this will result in the wrong findings, and you could have a worse gameplan than if you were to write one down from your thoughts.

When I speak of “SEO software” I’m referring to things that help you build backlinks, not software that is designed explicitly for keyword research or piecing together your competitors SEO profiles by skimming their backlink profiles and putting them into a list for you to build manually.

Avoid automated SEO software that builds your links because 9/10 it will go wrong and the other 1/10 it will be even worse. You may see your rankings go up slightly, but that’s as far as they will go, and your rankings will only tank after that.

In House SEO vs. Outsourcing SEO

If you had talked to big corporations ten years ago about doing SEO, they would be all ears. Now, these same companies have in house SEO teams doing all of the work and don’t outsource at all. The main reason for this is because they hire talent at a lower price per person than it would cost to hire a business who specializes in SEO.

If you’re not a millionaire, like most of us, you’ll likely want to outsource the SEO work to credible sources around the internet. You could go with a company that specializes in SEO, which would cost a little more because you don’t have to manage anything yourself, but you could have fewer headaches in the end. If you outsource to cherry-picked freelancers, you will have to micromanage them and get reports, but it will be cheaper since you don’t have to pay for their office or taxes.

In house SEO is something you could also do, but this would require you to hire someone who specializes in SEO, and that would be at least R200 an hour salary (on the low end) for someone who knows what they’re doing. This is one reason smaller businesses hire freelancers on a per order basis.

In the end

Off page, SEO needs to be done if you want to rank for medium to high difficulty keywords. You may not even rank for more accessible keywords if you’re not doing off page SEO, so you may want to dabble a bit to see what happens. You’ll always want to do it right in the beginning, so you don’t have to go back and fix things later on down the road. Remember, quality over quantity is ALWAYS better, so you need to write great content on both your website and any website that is going to be linking to you.

Have you used any Off Page SEO techniques and what have worked for you? Leave your comments and questions in the comments section below.