If you are a webmaster, blogger, marketer or just a person looking for some quality traffic to your website then you should understand the importance of SEO. You might think that paid ads is the way to get visitors but let’s face it – when was the last time you clicked on advertisements?
The truth is that people who Google a particular keyword prefer to click on the Natural results rather than clicking on Advertisements. Are you one of us?
Paid advertisements can cost somewhere around $0.50 to $50 per click! On the other hand SEO is definitely much cheaper and targets quality visitors. Unlike paid advertisements the traffic increase does not happen overnight but requires time, dedication and persistence.
Ok fine, you are a webmaster and you know how important SEO is. You’ve created and awesome website, wrote good title tags, optimized your internal links and provided quality content. Maybe you even went as far as canonizing you website to direct to the same URL and optimized it for faster web loading.
The question is this: after all the work on SEO, why am I not getting any traffic? And why am I not indexed on Google?
The answer is simple – you’ve done a great job for On-page SEO but what about Off-page SEO? I cannot stress enough about how important off-page SEO is. Actually 75% of SEO is off-page, which means all the work you did on your website is only rated at 25%!
Off-page SEO checklist
Off-page SEO is how popular your website is on the web. Below is a checklist of all the important factors you need to do for a great job. Increase in popularity will ultimately rank your website higher on search engines and drive more traffic.
- Link Building
- Social Networking
- Content writing and submission
- Blogging
- Forum Posting
- Social Bookmarking
Off-page SEO is all about getting quality links from other websites. Having a backlink is like saying to a search engine: hey! See, I link to this website so I consider it to be interesting for my visitors. I also recommend it to you so you probably should check it out!
Right now you probably think that submitting your website to some directories, doing a few blog posts here and there will do the job. You are wrong – getting a link is not an easy so just keep on reading this article and find out how!
How to get Links to your website?
Directory submission is a way out; the problem is that it will take time. Apart from that, recent studies show that some directories can do more harm than good to your rank, as they provide low quality links.
My favorite way of getting a link incorporates most of the points mentioned in the SEO checklist above. I write an interesting article, submit it to a good quality website and finally promote it with the help of social networks, blogs and forums. Just don’t forget to add your link!
This is an actual real life example of how I contact webmaster to submit my article in return for a link:
The reply:
Good luck with your Off-page SEO!
Author Bio: Dimitri Hrusha works for VikingPC. We are developers of VikingPCHealth anti-malware software. At work I do SEO and Web Marketing activities in general. This means that I spend a lot of time Googling, writing e-mails and browsing odd parts of the web.
Some Guest Authors put some affiliate links and links to irrelevant sites, which makes even the good post bad to Search Engines.
Some do, but it is credit to the authors site and relevancy to the article will not hurt search.
you sure are right about the amount of work you need to do on off page SEO compared to the on-page SEO
Nike, especially after Google Panda and Penguin update online reputation is everything.
Nice Post. i look forward to do SEO For my blog
http://tecknobuzz.com
any starting tips would be nice
Saad Asad, a first starting tip would be not to post your website link to comments on other blogs. It looks spammy.
Google’s algorithms are intelligent enough to distinguish a natural link from a spammy one.
I suggest you get good quality link to your site.
its funny because a lot of people always do one or the other. either they dont have good on page seo so their off page seo doesn’t work effectively, or they dont do enough offpage seo so all the work they do on their website just hangs.
Good advice for off-page SEO. I am already doing that and i hope to see the results reflect in my ranking.
Victor, SEO takes time to see a difference! Just be patient and you’ll do great! :)
Very helpful post. I’m actually struggling to get any impact so far for my off page seo, even though I believe I’m doing most things the right way. One question I have is that my site url changed from .com to .co.uk and the newer site still has over 22,000 links from the .com. I’m pretty sure that this is badly damaging(?) but I can’t get the guys I bought the site from to remove all the links. They just keep talking about redirects. Any advice on this would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Yes, I agree with you that Visitors like organic results rather than inorganic results and Offpage techniques like Link Building,social networking,content submission,blogging,forum posting and social bookmarking etc are very effective to promote your website. Anyways, I like your post and it’s very newsworthy.Thanks and keep in sharing.
Dean, you can still make a good use of the back links from the .com domain. All you need to do is set up a 301. Just follow the steps below:
1. Open your htacess file
2.Paste the code below:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
You are done!
Yes, you can use respective checklist but always take care about your back links. It should be genuine rather than Google will deindex your web site.