No SEO strategy is complete without going beyond the confines of your own website and engaging in off page SEO. Off page SEO can be termed as a popularity contest. It includes building a digital reputation by creating backlinks and reputation validation across the web. Search engines results are based on useful content that is trusted enough to be recommended to users. Useful optimized content is part of on page SEO. Building trust is essentially done by off page SEO techniques.

Why you need to do Off Page SEO?

Search engines drive organic traffic to your website. Organic traffic is free, relevant and high quality as the buyer or visitor has already shown intent by searching for keywords that are relevant to your content. It is much easier to sell a product or service to a person who already has intent, rather than somebody who is not interested in your product or service. You need to optimize your website for search engines and ensure you are ranking well for relevant keywords to drive organic traffic to your website.

Depending on your niche the activities you do for off page SEO will vary greatly. We have put together this stellar checklist that is applicable to almost any WordPress website that you want to do off page SEO for.

Off-page SEO Checklist

Strategies of building backlinks

1.Google Links

The fastest way to get indexed on google is to build your presence on google owned websites and tools. This includes creating a YouTube channel, signing up for google analytics and installing a tracking code on your website, creating a property on google web master tools and also setting up google my business. All of these steps will help google index your website faster. Backlinks from Google owned properties are also of high value.

2.Guest Blogging

Matt Cutts, former head of Web Spam at Google said 5 years ago:

“Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop.”

It’s been more than 5 years since this was said, but thousands of people continue to use this strategy to gain backlinks. Reason? It still works.

Google which is the most dominant search engine loves fresh new content. Posting your articles frequently on authoritative blogs will definitely do a big favour for your website. New links from various blogs relevant in your niche will improve your search engine rankings. Producing high quality engaging articles is the key to getting other website or blog owners to post your content with links to your website.

One of the most challenging part of guest blogging is finding relevant websites. Here are some search operators that you can use to find opportunities for guest blogging:

• [your_topic] “write for us”
• [your_topic] “become an author”
• [your_topic] “guest post”
• [your_topic] “guest article”
• [your_topic] inurl:contribute

3.Question and Answer Sites

This is now one of the most widely used off page SEO techniques. Just open a website like Quora and see the amount of answers that have links to other websites. Question and Answer websites are a great source of powerful backlinks for your website. People ask all sorts of questions related to your business or your website. You can search for these questions on Q & A websites and answer them. It’s good to be highly descriptive in your answer and make sure you don’t make it obvious you are answering for a backlink. It should be contextual. Examples of Q & A websites are: Quora, Reddit, Linkedin, ehow and stackoverflow.

4.Profile Creation Sites

Link building is evolving and the tactics to create backlinks are constantly changing. Some of these tactics are tried and tested and while others are somewhat creative. Profile links are right in the middle of those tactics. Number of links pointing to a website doesn’t matter. It is the number of relevant links that matters. The trick with profile creations is to determine whether these profile links are relevant to your niche. For example a link to a graphic design agency website from Behance is relevant or a link to a web design agency from Stackoverflow is also relevant.

5.Web 2.0s

Factors that are considered by search engines to rank websites in search results are constantly changing. Over the past few years one of the most important metrics that helps in improving search engine rankings and continues to be relevant is backlinks. Web 2.0s are a quick and efficient way of creating high quality and relevant backlinks. Web 2.0s are publisher type websites that you can create a web page on, easily with a unique url. Before web 2.0s creating even a basic website required a tedious amount of code. With web 2.0s such as WordPress, Blogger, Blogspot, Tumblr, Medium and many other similar blogging platforms the process of creating simple web pages has become extremely easy. They are a great source of referral traffic. Since you are in control of the web page, it is easy to create backlinks from Web 2.0s. Most Web 2.0s have good metrics such as page rank and domain authority which will pass link juice to your main website.

6.Social Bookmarking

Social platforms are websites that users visit and interact with each other. Social bookmarking is sharing your links on these social platforms to generate backlinks and traffic. Generally content that is high quality, engaging and useful tends to be shared on social websites. The more users share content the more likely it is to get viral and drive traffic to your website. Here are a few Social bookmarking websites that you can take advantage of: Twitter, Pintrest, Stumbleupon, Dribble, Pocket, Digg, Reddit, Sladshot, Sccop.it

7.Local Listings

Listing your business on Google my business and other similar websites is a great way to increase your visibility. Google my business is a directory, but it’s much more important than other directories. It’s easy to claim and optimize your listing on Google my business.  It helps with local SEO and when you build back links in other regional listings, Search engines easily understand which region is targeted. Bing also has a similar directory: Bing places for business and it is important to list your business there as well.

8.Image Submissions

Image searches have recently seen a spike and are driving more traffic than ever before to websites. If you are optimizing your content then you are only doing so for web search. Given the increase in image searches and their performance, image sharing websites such as Flickr, Instagram, Pintrest and Tumblr are great for submitting your images.

Image submissions should not only be limited to images but you can expand and submit relevant infographics as well to infographic sharing websites. This is one of the most recent and most effective techniques for off page SEO. They are a great way to share information, keep users engaged and drive traffic to your website. Their popularity has grown tremendously in the recent past as they are more interesting than long articles and our brains tend to process visuals faster as well.

The key to using infographics for SEO is to create innovative and informative graphics in coherent way. These are likely to get shared widely, making them viral and in helping you to improve your search engine rankings.

9.Video Submissions

Video submission is one of the most upcoming and influential means of promoting a website. Many video submission websites have good metrics such as page rank, page authority and domain authority. Submitting your videos to these websites will boost your search engine rankings. When submitting video content it is important to optimize the title of the video and have a decent length description.

Whilst search engines cannot understand the content of the video, they can understand the description which will be beneficial is it is at least 250 – 300 words. You can submit videos to websites such as YouTube, Vimeo and Daily Motion. YouTube is the second largest search engine and having your content on it is an absolute must.

10.Audio Submissions

This is another powerful technique for search engine optimization and link building. It is a new method that not many people know about or often ignore. Audio is the most attractive way of sharing your content after image and video. When creating audio content it is important to stick to what is relevant to your business and not just share or submit any type of audio. Here is a list of websites you can submit your audio files to:

• http://www.reverbnation.com
• http://www.box.com
• http://www.myspace.com
• http://www.pandora.com/
• http://www.picosong.com

11.PowerPoint Submissions

PowerPoint submission is a highly effective off page SEO tactic to attract targeted traffic, get quality backlinks and improve your websites ranking in major search engines. PPT is a presentation in which you can easily organize your data in slides. You can submit these power point presentations to various websites such as slideshare, calameo, scribd and others to get backlinks.

12.Broken Link Building

In this method you can acquire links by finding broken links, reproducing the content in that broken link and helping website owners fix their broken links with your reproduced content. There are many tools that can help you find broken links. Once you find a broken links simply contact the web master and request them to update the link with a link to your content. This is one of the few off page SEO techniques that you can easily scalable.

Conclusion

There are dozens of other off page seo techniques that you can use. We have put together the ones that are most relevant and applicable to almost any website. Make sure you take advantage of these SEO techniques to boost your rankings and drive more traffic to your website. You will need to remember though that ranking on search engines does not happen overnight and it’s also not a one-time deal. You will often find yourself repeating various techniques mentioned in this list. However if you implement each technique mentioned here it won’t be long before you start to see a boost in your organic traffic. You may also want to learn our ultimate guide on how to seo a WordPress blog.