Search Engine Optimization starts with On-Page SEO but is given its final touch via Off-Page SEO. In a nutshell, Off-Page SEO tells Google what others think about your website. Activities that are done away from a website or a web page to raise the ranking in Google search results fall into the category of Off-Page SEO, which is equally important to anything that happens within a website.

If a website has many valuable links pointing to its web pages, search engines will automatically assume that this website has great content that provides value for users searching the keywords in those web pages and links. But Off-Page SEO is not limited to links, it just starts from there.

Several aspects of this type of SEO create a big grid for “spiders” to walk on and gather further information for their index, providing more information about a website’s content.

These aspects include but are not limited to:

Links

In essence, it is almost impossible for Google and similar search engines to determine the value of any web page if no links are pointing to it. No matter how fresh, helpful, or in-depth a web page is, if there is no link pointing to it, then it might as well be “dead”. Even if a website is extremely popular, preparing it for link building is essential in increasing the SEO quality and therefore in increasing its ranking.

For example, in 2015 a research by SEOmoz showed that twitter.com, despite being a powerful domain, showed a loss of 0.75% at Google search during 2015:

Interlinking pages using keywords with more emphasis on the website’s brand name, optimizing internal pages, and using strong keywords to link to other pages of your website from web page content help you increase your search engine ranking. Especially during big events, linking parts of your website that mention that event’s name [strong keyword for engagement during the event’s period] will make search engines understand that these links are useful for users that search for that event.

For example, linking the keyword name of a big sporting event when having a sports news website is crucial during the time that sporting event is taking place, whether it is just a match or a whole tournament.

Trust

Trustworthiness and SEO are a pair not so heavily based on metrics and numbers rather than the concept of trust and how users, as well as search engines, perceive it. Google has said that it does not use this type of metric to rank websites, however, in April 2018 the company was granted a patent related to evaluating the trustworthiness of links. This does not mean they are using it for SEO and search engine ranking.

The idea of ranking based on trust is based on the following logic: the fewer clicks someone needs to reach your website from several highly-trusted websites, the better your trustworthiness is, therefore there better your ranking based on trust is. This seems legitimate up to a point, but since Google has reiterated it does not take trustworthiness into account, it is a matter of users and how they perceive websites they visit.

For example, a link about health leading to your website that is featured on the website of The World Health Organization would be considered trustworthy de facto, since the official health organization would host it. However, since trustworthiness is a grey area, Google does not seem eager to enter these… waters just yet, when it comes to ranking.

TLS

While on the subject of trust, something way more substantial and an integral part of new-age Off-Page SEO is TLS. Transport Layer Security, and its now-deprecated predecessor Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), are cryptographic protocols designed to provide communications security over a computer network. Simply put, TLS makes sure that the connection between the server (website) and the web browser (user’s browser) is secure, and data breaches will not happen, endangering users’ information. Websites with TLS/SSL licensing are safer and seem to rank higher than similar websites that do not own that kind of license.

Social Media

Two words: Social Media. Probably the most popular form of Off-Page SEO currently, even above links and backlinks in many instances, is Social Media. Companies and agencies build their whole strategies for a fiscal year based on Social Media campaigns, how they promote their website links and other actions on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more.

Back in 2014, Matt Cutts revealed that metrics such as Facebook likes and Twitter followers, do not affect search rankings. However, a 2018 study by Hootsuite showed the SEO results of articles with and without social promotion. The former received a 22% boost in ranking during the experiment!

One thing to keep in mind, as you might have noticed, is that Social Media profiles rank normally in search engines. For example, a Google search for “Kim Kardashian” includes the following in the first screen: a “Top Stories” carousel, her Twitter account, and her Instagram account. Just below her Instagram profile result, users will find the celebrity’s Wikipedia page, which is one of the most popular websites in Google rankings.

Blocking

Black Hat SEO techniques are ways for websites to try and “shade” their way into higher-ranking positions, which can lead to a penalty by search engines. The Off-Page SEO counterpart of Black Hat is Blocking. This is out of a website’s grasp and it has to do with to aspects of the Internet as a whole:

• Blocking by Visitors
• Blacklisted website

In both cases, we are talking about an SEO-dampening effect, “falling” upon a website either due to the users not trusting/blocking the website and its web pages or due to a blacklist of some kind. Depending on the content of a website, there is always the possibility that a search engine or another organization will blacklist it. This usually happens to websites that are associated with crimes of different kinds of websites/web pages that contain (and trigger) malicious software in users’ computers.

Tags: Links SEO, Off-Page SEO, SEO, Social Media, Social Media SEO, TLS SEO