What is Off-Page SEO, And Why Is It Important?
When people talk about off-page SEO, they’re mostly talking about the quality and quantity of links from other websites to your website.
This is important as Google has confirmed that it uses links from other websites to determine if your page ranks in search results. In fact, it is one of the top two ranking factors, with the other being the relevance of your content to what people search for.
The reason for this is that anytime another website links to your website, Google sees that as a “vote” for the quality of your content. The more votes you have, the higher quality your website appears to be.
You can create a lot of great content on your website, but if you have no links pointing to your website, nobody will find it!
How Can I Build Links To My Website?
This is easier said than done! Most people won’t just link to your website without a good reason, so it is often a medium-long term marketing effort to build links.
Some examples of tactics you could try:
- If you have any suppliers, or partnered businesses, ask them to link to your website from theirs.
- Write a testimonial for a product or service you’ve used, and ask them to link back to your website if they feature your testimonial online.
- Take part in some interviews, for example for a website that interviews entrepreneurs in your niche and request a link from the posted interview.
- Create useful content and resources that people are likely to link to. Check out our page on content marketing for more on this one!
What Kind Of Links Count?
It’s important to note that the quality of the websites that link to your website matters, not just the number of links you have. For example, a link from a high ranking website will help a lot more than from a brand new one with zero authority.
Links from social media platforms will not improve your website ranking, as the social networks place a special tag on the links called “nofollow”, which basically prevents it from working as a vote in favour of your website.