So, you’ve optimized your site content and followed all those under-the-hood best practices to maximize your appeal to search engines…what’s next? Executing a truly complete SEO strategy means going beyond the confines of your own site to also engage in off-page SEO.
A search engine ranking isn’t solely based on your own site’s merits; it’s also a bit of a popularity contest. Off-page SEO includes bolstering your digital reputation and authority by earning both backlinks and reputation-validating placements across the web. Search engines strive to connect information-seekers with content they’ll find valuable, and these off-page factors demonstrate there’s a world out there that believes your site and your content is useful and trusted enough to recommend. Said another way: search engines want their users coming back, and quickly pointing them to the relevant information they need is the golden ticket – your goal is making that job as easy as possible for them.
To that end, here are seven specific techniques for building links and growing your site’s reputation from an off-page SEO perspective:
Link-Building Techniques
While earning a link from another site helps affirm your brand’s relevance and authority in the eyes of search engines, not all backlinks are created equal. Search engines view a link to an external site as a recommendation, and the reputation of the linking site informs how much weight that link carries. This being the case, effective link building means not just earning backlinks, but high-quality ones.
Search engines assign links their value based on several factors, including the linking site’s overall authority and the number of backlinks to the site—generally, sites with good off-page SEO make more weighty recommendations. Links also carry more value coming from pages that are more relevant