Top 8 Off-page SEO Techniques to Rank Higher than Your Competitors

Off-page SEO – The concept has changed a great deal, with search engines making major updates every now and then. Some techniques that worked years ago still work today. Some are not as effective as they used to be while others have become utterly useless or even detrimental.

The interesting thing about this concept is that the dimension has changed. In the past, it was just about getting backlinks to your site. Today, anybody who wants to implement the very best off-page SEO should look in 2 directions:

Quality Backlink Building: This has always been an important part of off-page SEO. That has not changed. What has changed are the techniques and their effectiveness.

Social Signals: Today, search engines consider how much likes, shares, comments, reactions, followings, and likes you get in the social media sites. This is a new dimension.

You must pay attention to these 2 factors to succeed with your off-page SEO efforts.

Below are 8 techniques you can use to build quality backlinks and strong social signals in 2018:

Build relationships
Building a successful business involves building relationships. The same thing applies to build a healthy SEO linking profile. You need to interact with peers and authorities in your industry. Join niche specific groups and forums.

Take part in discussions. Collaborate with others. Share what you know. Do favors for others. Ask for favors too. With that, you will begin to build your reputation which makes everything else easy.

Ask for Backlinks
This is called link outreach. The way it works is simple. Post something interesting, intriguing or exceptional and ask your peers to mention it in their blog. Some will. Some will not. If you’ve been building relationships in your industry, your success rate with this will be higher.

Guest Blogging/Guest Posting
Guest posting is still very effective in 2018 but the way it is done has changed slightly. In the past, the focus was on getting a guest posting opportunity from any site. And when you got it, you just posted any mediocre article.

Today, the quality of the site and the content you put out matters a lot. This is because of the concept called “link neighborhood”. This simply means the network of sites you give and receive backlinks from.

Backlinks from a low-quality site can affect your site. So before you accept a guest posting opportunity from any site, ensure that they keep to Google webmaster terms like posting original contents and avoiding plagiarism.

Build Social Media Profiles for Your Site and Brand
This is the first step in building a strong social media presence. You need to create profiles for your brand. On Facebook, you can create a business page. Google plus, twitter, and Instagram are all important as well.

But building these profiles is not what is more important. Giving them attention is. So you need to consider that when choosing the number of profiles to create.

Build Your Social Media Community
Now that you have your profile set up, your next focus should be growing the number and quality of your followership and fan base.

Post regularly and respond to comments. Engage your followership. Bring up interesting topics. Ask your followers and fans to invite their friends. Take part in groups and forums. Put your social media handle everywhere. Market it offline.

With these, you will build a thriving community who engage passionately with your every post.

Ask For Shares and Engagement
Most people won’t take action unless asked to. Encourage your fans and followers to share, like and comment on your posts and updates.

One way to do this is to ask questions at the end of your post. Even something as simple as adding the share button on your site can increase the shares your posts get.

Do Things That Make Others Talk About You Online
This is called link bait. It is about doing things that make other sites link to you. For example, you can write a deep and detailed guide on an important topic in your industry which nobody has written about. You can create an infographic and give people the permission to use it on their site. You can create a powerful course and give it out for free. You can run contests.

Other site owners and bloggers in your industry will naturally write about this. When they do, you can be sure that a backlink will follow. Or how else are they supposed to write about your site without typing in the link to your site?

Look for Brand Mentions and Turn Them to Backlinks
This is similar to the previous technique. As more people write about you on their sites, there are chances that some site authors will just mention your site name as ordinary text instead of a link.

You can track these pages and contact the authors. Tracking is simple. Just follow these steps:

STEP #1: go to google.com

STEP #2: type in the following parameters “yoursite.com” (with the quotes) + -http: + -https: (remove the + and replace with space bar)

STEP #3: hit enter

This will display every page on the internet which mentioned your site as just text.

Click over and look for the contact information of the site owner. Contact them and tell them about it. Most of them will oblige.

There you have it – 8 best off-page SEO techniques to help you get to the top of search results.

So, if you are a small business owner and you desire to get your site ranking high in search queries, try these techniques today and see your site skyrocket to the top of the search engine.

However, for a faster result, it is advisable to hire a full-service digital marketing agency to help you because figuring things out on your own may take time.