SEO has changed drastically. No longer is it sufficient to make a one time spend for On-site SEO and expect to be ranked. For a business to get ranked and maintain a high ranking in Google, Bing or other search engines requires having both good on-site SEO, and an active off-site SEO strategy. While initially a little more onsite SEO will be required,
long term your off-site SEO strategy plays a much greater role in your sites ability to be ranked. SEOMoz.org estimates that only 30% of your ability to be ranked is related to on-site SEO. The other 70% is a result of what you do off-site.
If 70% of your site’s influence with search engines is from your off-site SEO work, what is involved with putting together an effective off-site SEO campaign?
1. Unique Compelling is Your Foundation
Off-site SEO includes investing time and money in quality link building, social influence and developing your domain authority, but most importantly it starts with developing unique, meaningful content. Central to everything you do and what determines your ability to rank is your content.
Merely creating content is not enough. If you go through the motions and piece together articles just for the sake of using keywords to rank, do you think anyone will want to share this information. When you read an article about a topic, think about what you share? Is it marginal or off poor quality? No,when you share an article, video or information, it is interesting or useful and you believe will have value to the person you are sharing it with.
Creating interesting content is one of the biggest challenges facing a business that wants to implement an effective offsite SEO strategy. It is compelling and interesting content that will drive social influence. You have to help potential customers solve a problem, be entertained, be educated or in general create a piece of content that others will place a high enough value on to engage them and want to it with others.
2. Unique compelling content is not just about articles.
Today search engines love video, infographics and photos. In fact a whole social media site, Pinterest has sprung up around photo sharing. Here are some ideas to change the way you present your information to your audience:
- Rather than listing a table with a bunch of statistics, why not take that information and convert it into a visually pleasing infographic.
- Take that blog post and convert a few key points into an engaging 2-3 minute video.
- Always use visually pleasing and interesting photos for your blog post.
Your readers, potential customers or visitors will more likely be engaged with a great infographic a video or interesting photo, rather than just a bunch of statistics or text. A video or infographics also provides you with an opportunity to repurpose the material and present it in a different way. Since every person learns in a different way, a video may appeal to an auditory learner, while an infographic and text will appeal to a visual learners.
3. Consider What Keywords to Rank for Carefully
Yes. creating interesting and compelling information on your website is important and will help you with the search engine rankings. Especially if you are properly incorporating in long tailed key words naturally into the article and making sure the articles have good SEO structure. Each blog posts will be an additional indexed page and should be centered around a keyword. If it it is a long tailed keyword it will be as competitive and your chances of ranking for that keywords greatly improves.
For example in my case trying to rank for a keyword such as marketing would take a very big budget, a vast quantity of content and several months if not years to rank well. Even then, there are no guarantees. On the other hand if I try and rank for “marketing advice in Charlotte” you will see this website come up in one of the top position, or if you search on “marketing help in Charlotte” you will see my other site, MFBmarketingSolutions.com will come up near the top – at least at the time of this publish date for this post. To maintain this position I will have to continue to work at both onsite and offsite SEO centered around long tailed keywords such as SEO Marketing in Charlotte or help with SEO in Charlotte.
4. Social Influence Matters
To increase your chances of ranking and gaining influence with the search engines requires building up your recognized authority. This requires increasing your social influence and building your domain authority. Increasing your social influence is just that. How many followers and likes do you have, new followers you are gaining each month, your engagement and dialogue with them, retweets, etc. are all indicators of your social influence.
5. Quality Links Help You Increase Domain Authority
Domain authority is a calculated value developed by Moz.com. It is used to help you gauge your sites ability to rank with search engines, mostly Google. Although you will have the trickle down effect – rank well with Google and chances are you will rank well in other search engines.
Moz.com’s definition, of domain authority is a “calculated metric for how well a given domain is likely to rank in Google’s search engine. It is based off data from the Mozscape web index and includes link counts, MozRank and MozTrust scores, and dozens of other factors.” Their recommendation to influence your Domain Authority is “to improve your overall SEO. In particular, you should focus on your link profile, which influences MozRank and MozTrust – by getting more links from other well-linked-to pages.”
Now, going back to you and building up you domain authority. To increase your influence in search engines requires building up your domain authority. To build up your domain authority will require link building.
A Big word of Caution – DO NOT DEVELOP spammy links. Google has clamped down on sites that try and gain influence by using spammy links. With the introduction and continued updates of Penguin, sites were crushed and will continue to be penalized for links considered to be poor, low quality spammy links.
For your site to increase its domain authority will require creating compelling content and having other high quality synergistic sites link bank to your sites. This is what will ultimately increase your domain authority.
In Conclusion.
To be ranked in search engines requires an active onsite and offsite SEO strategy. No longer is it enough to spend a few hundred dollars on SEO and expect to achieve any meaningful results. Consider, those being ranked higher and what their SEO budgets may be.
Your SEO strategy requires actively, creating unique content that others will want to share and link back to your site. A good SEO company will not only assist you with your onsite SEO but also your offsite SEO. They will work to create compelling, unique content, find good quality complimentary sites to post your information to with links back to your site, and incorporate a social media component to help you gain influence. This is what it takes to achieve meaningful results today. Anything less will only frustrate you and cause you to ask why you are not being ranked.
