What is Off-Page SEO and Why Does it Matter?

Search engine optimization includes a wide array of types of work and tasks that can be done in order to improve a website’s online visibility. While there are many different areas included in the world of SEO, there are two major categories of SEO: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. As the names of these categories would suggest, on-page SEO deals with work done directly on a website in order to improve its organic rankings with search engines, while off-page SEO deals with tasks outside of a website. Both sectors are extremely important for a website’s success.

Follow these simple tips for building a long-term SEO strategy. 

Search engine algorithms are constantly changing, but many of the tactics used in off-page SEO have remained effective for quite a few years, and SEO experts do not foresee huge changes that would render off-page SEO work obsolete. For this reason, it is important to ensure that off-page SEO is factored into your website’s marketing plans.

Discover some SEO basics for optimizing your website.

What is Included in Off-Page SEO?

Although there are different ways of going about it, the spine of off-page SEO work always remains the same: building backlinks. As they review a website, search engines look for inbound links from external sources in order to gauge the website’s visibility, popularity, and reliability. This means that building relevant, high-quality backlinks on other websites that lead to specific sections of content on the website being SEO’d is the core of all off-page SEO work. There are three different fields of backlinks, and it is important to know the differences between each one.

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The types of backlinks are:

• Natural links – these are links that are part of an article, page, story, or other piece of content. An example could be a link in a blog about landscaping to a landscaping equipment provider.
• Manual links – these come from influencers or customers and are usually shared through methods like social media, forums, or blogs. To get these set up, a request usually needs to be made to the individual sharing the link on the part of the website owner.
• Self-created links – these links are set up on shared or paid spaces by the SEO practitioner. Some sources of self-created links can be associated with negative SEO practices, so it is important to only use high-quality sources.

There are a few different strategies that can be engaged when building backlinks. Most experienced SEO professionals prefer quality over quantity when setting up links, meaning that backlinks are set up deliberately on relevant websites that are highly regarded by search engines and are accompanied by well-written relevant content.

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Why is Off-Page SEO Important?

Nobody knows the full extent of how Google’s search engine algorithm works, but most experts agree that off-page SEO is a huge part of how the search engine ranks websites. There are other factors that most would agree are more important, such as user engagement, content, and website quality, but any SEO professional worth their pay would make sure to include off-page SEO in their cocktail of SEO practices.

Learn all about the differences between off-page and on-page SEO.

SEO is not everyone’s cup of tea. To some, managing endless streams of data and trying to get the ever-changing algorithms of search engines to work in favour of a website seems like a nightmare. If you need help with your website’s SEO, the team at FirstPage Marketing is ready to help. Give us a call and we can help you get started.

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