If you’re reading this as a business owner, marketing manager, or executive, you might be searching for just one thing – how to get your business higher on that coveted list of search result rankings.
The strategies are numerous, but something that holds a lot of weight in where your business places is something called “off-page search engine optimisation,” or off-page SEO.
What is off-page SEO?
On-page SEO is everything you can see on a webpage – text, images, multimedia – that can contribute to the way the page is indexed and ranked by search engines like Google. But there’s a whole other world out there in off-page SEO.
Off-page SEO refers to the factors outside of the actual website you own which can contribute to the way your website ranks on search engines. Link-building, social media, and social bookmarking are all strategies to build your off-page SEO and get found online.
Having good off-page SEO is vital because it boosts your ranking in seach engine results, elevates your PageRank, gets traffic to go to your site, and helps more people find your site from other websites or from social media.
How do you build inbound links?
Inbound links, then, are links on other websites that point to your own. This area of marketing is a challenge, because what you’re trying to do is get websites outside of your control and owned by other people to link back to your page.
What this does is increase the authority of your website. When lots of good websites link to your site, Google’s algorithm assumes that your site has authority or is important and increases your search result ranking.
The absolute best way to get inbound links is by creating engaging, exciting content. If you create content that’s highly valuable or engaging, it makes it far more likely that other websites might naturally link to it.
You can form partnerships with other websites wherein you write guest blog posts for their site – both parties win, because they get extra content and you get a link back to your site to further boost your authority. Be careful not to overdo this, however. If it seems the partnership is just for the manipulation of Google’s algorithm, your website risks being penalised.
You can also submit links to online directories to get found online.
How shouldn’t you build inbound links?
There’s a number of practices to avoid when building inbound links:
- Don’t spam other websites with your links (in the comments or forum sections, for instance).
- Don’t pay for websites to display your links.
- Don’t use artificial link-building schemes.
- Don’t put too many outward links on your site – be selective.
