Having an awesome looking site with great content and snazzy graphics may look great to your visitors, but it’s worthless if visitors can’t find you when they search for keywords related to your business. Search engines look at an expanding variety of data that happens off the site links from other sites as a vital component to organic rankings. These includes links back to your site, citations, and social mentions.
Off-Site SEO Linking Factors Checklist
Generally, Google says the best advice for off-page SEO is to produce fabulous on-page content that other users will want to link to and share on their social networks. However, this doesn’t mean you can leave your content to generate links automatically. There are still some vitally important off-site ranking factors that can help your pages rank even better.
Different linking factors carry varying weights of importance – both positive and negative. Some of them change regularly, while others may change in importance or not at all. Google has suggested it makes one change per day to its ranking algorithm. Some of the most important ranking linking factors include:
On-Topic Relevant Links: Always try to obtain links to your site or pages from other sites and pages that are in a similar market or industry niche or talk about things relating to the topic of your site.
Social Mentions: Facebook likes, tweets, shares (LinkedIn and facebook), Google +1s, and social bookmarks, all signal to the search engines your pages are being noticed and valued. Like with linking, the way social mentions are received – in addition to variety – can impact your rankings.
External Links with Keyword Focused Anchor Text: The text you click on within the content of a page which takes you to another page on another site is called anchor text. A good example of an anchor text link with a good keyword focus is on-site seo ranking factors (the highlighted blue link is informing you of where you’re going to go).
Many Different Link Sources: It is far better to have a wide diversity of external links pointing to your site from lots of different domains than to have thousands from the same domain.
Keyword in the Title Tag: While the title tag is an on-page ranking factor, an external link with similar keyword focused anchor text to a keyword in the title tag boosts the power of any link – especially in Bing.
Domain Trust: If a domain has been on the Internet a long time and has built up many links over the years, search engines will regard it as being more trustworthy and therefore a better link. For example, a link from Harvard’s site will be seen by search engines as far more trustworthy than a link from a new unofficial blog from a set of students from a particular school. Of course, it may be almost impossible to ever get a link from Harvard!
Analyze Your Off-Site Linking Strategy
There are plenty of free and paid SEO link analysis tools for you to perform full or partial backlink audits to help you identify whether your linking profile is strong from an SEO perspective. But, you can contact us for a full SEO audit of your website that will highlight all your problem areas in detail for on-site and off-site factors, including a deep dive into your rankings, Web analytic audit, and competitor review. To learn more or order an SEO site audit today, call 800.979.3177 or click here.
