off-page optimization

OffPage optimization is part of search engine optimization and aims to increase the presence of a website on the Internet. By generating backlinks through persuasion and link building, you can ensure that Google presents your site higher up.

Definition

OffPage optimization is an important part of your search engine optimization (SEO). While OnPage SEO deals with what you can do yourself on your website to achieve higher positions on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP), here you work on the authority of your site through “external influences”.

Your site’s authority, or domain authority, describes how trustworthy a search engine ranks a website. For this, Google, Bing and Co use so-called crawlers, which scan a website to calculate aPageRankbased on various factors . One of the most important factors is the number and quality of your backlinks. That’s why link building is one of the most important tasks of your OffPage SEO.

What are backlinks?

To illustrate what backlinks are, you can use the prime example of internal links: Wikipedia. The blue, clickable words are internal links, because they point to another subpage of the domain wikipedia.de/. External links, i.e. backlinks, work according to the same principle, with the difference that these links point to another, foreign domain.

Example of internal links from Wikipedia:

If a cross reference to your page is installed on another page, a back link is created for you, which, depending on the value of the linking page, directs the corresponding link juice to your page. The value of such a link depends on the domain authority of the linking page. Because links from a Bad Neighbourhood will significantly lower your ranking, you need to make sure that you get lots of high quality backlinks.

How does OffPage optimization work?

In OffPage SEO work, it is important to obtain the right backlinks through effective link building. Google calculates your PageRank and the Domain Authority through the number and quality of the backlinks. Because this system relies on placing a lot of backlinks, it led to a lot of spam being produced in the past via link farms, libraries and so on.

To counteract this, links in forums or blogs are recognized by Google since the Penguin update and are no longer considered as strongly – they can even have a negative effect on your Pagerank. Even in the field of black hat SEO, backlinks were created by link sellers using dubious methods. However, there are reputable providers who offer the service and provide good backlinks and do not simply sell the linking.Good OffPage SEO work is steady work on the presence of your site on the Internet. The best way to do that is to produce good content. If you can convince your users with good, attractive content and they like to use your site, the probability is high that they will also recommend your site and link to it themselves. This way you can combine OffPage and OnPage optimization.

What makes a good backlink?

Important for the appropriate backlink is that the linking page fits thematically to your concern. Google’s algorithms, which are getting better and better, can recognise on the basis of keywords whether the pages fit together – or whether a link is not rather spam.

The anchor text or the link text – the text you click on – is also an important criterion. If the text does not describe the linked page, but simply says “here”, search engines do not make any reference to the content.

OffPage SEO is a tedious business. You need to work on your content and try to collaborate with other appropriate websites. You can’t do this work in a hurry. A steady, natural looking link building is also recognized by search engines today. If your site shows such a link profile, it will be recognized by the algorithm as an organic one and will be ranked better accordingly. However, if the crawler detects a jump in your backlinks, it will see a sign of Black Hat SEO here and classify your site as less trustworthy.

If Google is convinced that you are spamming your site, the worst that can happen is that your site will be removed from the SERPs. No one can afford not to be displayed by the most important search engine.

Conclusion

If you want to make sure that Google rewards your OffPage SEO work with a high position on the SERP, you need to constantly work on OffPage optimization. Many OnPage optimization measures already help you with this. You can see the presence of your site on the internet with different tools like the Trust Flow or Citation Flow. Through persuasion and collaboration with other sites, you can improve the authority and thus the page rank of your site. Also, today there are service providers like Backlinked that can do this work for you.