Off-page SEO concerns the optimization of your website’s brand outside of the website itself. This is where most of newData’s organic SEO work is conducted. Here are some of the items we address:
RSS feeds are a way to tell the world any changes you have made to your website. RSS (referred to as Rich Site Summary, replacing Really Simple Syndication) gives people and computers access to new content in a standardized format. Changes get uploaded automatically to an RSS submission directory. Our search engineers feel that an RSS feed is one of those “must-have” SEO components that are necessary to help your website achieve improved rankings.
The bulk of off-page SEO centers on the creation of backlinks. Simply put, backlinking refers to how one site links to another. When a website has many other websites linking back to it, this ideally means there is something compelling going on. These are called “quality” backlinks. But not all backlinks are good. It is not just the number of backlinks that matter, but the quality of those links as well as their sources. For example, someone may have commented in a positive manner about one of your products or services in a blog post. This is great. Similarly, an entire blog containing = original content about your website and containing a link to it may be posted. Even better! For search engines, blog commenting and blog posting is an important determinant of your site’s ranking and online reputation. However, backlinks from non-relevant websites can hurt you. Backlinks from “linkfarms” (websites that exist to boost the number of backlinks to a website, thereby attempting to trick search engines into ranking a website higher) can actually get you blacklisted by Google. This is considered an unethical “Black Hat” SEO practice, and these types of backlinks are considered “toxic” or “spam” backlinks.
Considering the risk of toxic backlinks to your business, you may be wondering exactly what constitutes a “quality” backlink. When a search engine directs users to your webpage, it usually means that there is a compelling reason to refer to you and that your website is a trusted source of relevant content. One way that search engines assess the quality of a link is to weight the links by the popularity of the referral website (i.e., its page rank). The reality is that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of signals that are processed and analyzed by search engines to determine how trustworthy, relevant and authoritative the link is. For reputable search engine providers like newData who practice ethical “White Hat” SEO, it is as much an art as it is a science to keep up with the ever-changing measurement of a link’s quality.
Another way your brand gets noticed is through article submissions. Here, relevance and authority are factors that tell the search engines how to assess the quality of your articles. Another critical piece of the SEO puzzle is knowing where and when to submit the articles. See our post Why Branded Keywords Matter and How to Promote Your Brand with SEO.
Social media is also very important in organic keyword promotion. We include a host of social media services with all of our SEO packages.
In the last few years, videos have become more valuable to search engines. Like written content, the originality and relevance of the promoted videos matters. For one thing, videos increase the time your visitors spend on your site, and if done right, videos enhance their overall experience. This increased engagement boosts your site’s popularity with search engines as a viable link source. While videos are extremely popular today, it is important that your content keeps up with whatever medium is important in the future.
Like blogs, posting and commenting on relevant forums is a must for many businesses. Understanding what forums to post to and comment on is more important than sheer volume. Local and national business directories can also give your website an organic SEO boost. Fortunately, newData has a formidable foothold on commercial directories in the United States. In fact, this capability is one of our comparative and differentiated competitive advantages for organic SEO. While quality directory submissions can support your rankings on Google or Bing, we believe that it should be done irrespective of SEO. In other words, the right directories can give your brand relevance without search engines.
The Off-Page monthly report is an audit of all such activities (and much more) we do on your business’s behalf each month. In order to keep you up to date on our progress and any items that may need to be addressed, newData provides you with a detailed Monthly Off-Page Progress report.