Guidelines on Creating Links for Effective Offsite Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is often associated with what can be done on your website to improve its search results ranking. However there are also offsite SEO techniques, which are taken into consideration by search engines to gauge what is discussed about your website on other sites.
Examples of offsite SEO include:
- Guest posting on relevant websites
- Backlinks from comments, forums and review websites
- Social media mentions
The first step is to look for links from connections you already have in the industry. Similarly, your business can join industry organizations to quickly build a set of influential backlinks.
When you build a backlink profile for your website, there some things to pay attention to:
Quality of Links
Link quality in the eyes of search engines is based on the authority of the target website and how relevant it is in connection to your product. When checking on a target website, consider the following:
- A minimum domain authority (DA) of 20. The rule here is: the higher, the better.
- Links within the content copy are better than separate links in a list.
- Check for how many links are already on the same page. The more links to other websites, the weaker is the link to your website.
Link Velocity
Building a strong backlink profile takes time. You can start with a few in the beginning and expand regularly.
There is no fixed schedule you have to stick to, but it has to be consistent. Avoid creating a high number of backlinks from the start and then abandon any efforts in this regard. It’s that kind of negative velocity you want to avoid.
Number of Links
Having a couple of links from many different websites relevant to your industry is usually better than having a high number of links from few sources.
The more backlinks you have from different domains that are relevant and good quality, the better. In addition to your own link building, the blog posts you create and distribute will build natural backlinks of their own.
Link Diversity
Link variety implies having different types of backlinks. You should aim for a decent mix of backlinks from different types of websites such as:
- Content on industry-relevant sites
- Insightful comments on industry-relevant articles
- Backlinks from forums or other industry-relevant community resources
- Review websites such as Yelp
- Links from social media
The purpose is to create an authentic backlink profile with a rich diversity, which signals to search engines that your website has a commanding online presence and users can reach it from different sources.
