Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO is a term used to describe the optimization of a website for search engines. It is one of the factors that influence the position of a website on a search engine results page (SERP). Off-page SEO refers to the promotion of a website outside of its own domain or website.
This could include but is not limited to, other websites, blogs, social media, online directories, and forums. The focus here is not the creation of links to your site.
Link building
Link building is the process of creating inbound links to a website with the goal of improving search engine rankings.
Link building is crucial. It’s necessary if you want to grow and keep the stability of your ranking.
Methods:
Reciprocal link exchange Guest posting
Link building by doing side projects Social media
Leveraging Quora, Forums, Reddit Leveraging Dev.to, Medium, Hashnode GitHub
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Reciprocal link exchange
Reciprocal link exchange is an agreement between two website owners to link to each other’s sites. This is a way to get links from websites related to your own and can be a valuable part of your link-building strategy. To do a reciprocal link exchange, you simply need to find a website that you want to link to and then contact the owner to let them know that you would like to do a link exchange.
This method was very popular years ago. It’s less used now. If you have a friend with a website, you can ask him for a reciprocal link exchange.
🚨 Only use this method if your and your friend’s website is on the same topic. Don’t mix apples with pears.
Reciprocal link exchange can be an excellent method if you’re running your side projects. You can simply link between websites if they’re on the same topic.
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Guest posting
If you’re running a blog, guest posting may be a good opportunity for you to gain backlinks.
The process looks like this:
- Make sure your blog is high quality and relevant to your niche.
- Find guest posting opportunities by searching for blogs that accept guest posts in your niche.
- Reach out to the blog owner and pitch them your idea for a guest post. Behind the link above you can find the best outreach templates including suggested subject lines.
- If your guest post is accepted, be sure to follow the blog’s guidelines.
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Link building with side projects
Link building by doing side projects can be a very effective technique. It’s because you can promote every side project separately, and they can get a lot of backlinks. You can then push the link juice to your main project.
I did over 200 side projects in my career. Not all of them were published, though. But for those that I published, I tried to promote them, as you can see on my ProductHunt profile page.
Some of these projects receive over 50K visitors/month. You can link to your main project from various places. I mostly link back from the footer, but if there is a lot of content written, it’s better to link back from the content with relevant keywords.
I wrote more on this topic in a separate chapter.
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Leveraging Dev.to, Medium, Hashnode
If you’re a developer, you can write articles on Dev.to and Hashnode and link back to your main site. Both platforms allow do-follow links and can push some link juice back to your site.
On Medium, you can write about pretty much everything. Unfortunately, Medium uses no-follow backlinks. They won’t help you with search engine rank.
Still, you can get some decent traffic if your article will get traction. I do not use this method myself, though.
💡 Tip: Use in-content links with relevant keywords in the text. So for instance, if you want to link to your blog/web page that’s about “best SEO tools” and this is the keyword you are targeting try to use the same keyword linked to your article on one of the sites above.
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GitHub
If you’re doing open-source projects, this can be a great way to get backlinks to your content.
Github allows you to use one do-follow backlink in the right pane and point wherever you want.
Usually, developers point to the home page of the project. The domain rank of GitHub is high, so this would help a lot.
Content marketing
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience and, ultimately, drive profitable customer action.
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Build your brand
If your business is branded that’s a good opportunity for you. You can do link building and content marketing and target your brand name.
You can also attend podcasts or events.
Easily check how you’re doing with your brand by checking Google Trends. Just simply enter your brand name and search.
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Social media
If you’re active on social media, leverage it. Share your articles with others. It is an excellent way to spread the word, and some of your followers may even link back to your content.
You can share your content on other social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram.
Please remember that sharing on these platforms is usually followed by a short-term spike in direct traffic. In the long term, it doesn’t help much. But you may get a backlink, and that’s important to mention.
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Leveraging Quora, Forums, Reddit
Quora, Forums, and Reddit can be excellent opportunities for you to get backlinks.
Go to Quora and search for questions relevant to your content. Write a helpful answer and include a link back to your content.
Please keep in mind that most of the sites use no-follow links. They won’t push any link juice to your site and won’t improve your SEO rank. They still can help you to build backlinks. How?
People may notice your answer and write a blog post about it or mention it in blog comments and include your link there. Awareness can help you in long term.
The same technique you can use on Forums and Reddit.
💡 Tip: Before posting anything on Reddit, always check the rules for the specific subreddit. All subreddits have their own rules and moderators. If you are not sure about something, contact the moderators by DMs.
