SEO (“Search Engine Optimisation”) can often seem a bit like a dark art – everyone knows that they want it, but there are lots of competing theories about the best way to go about it. Add to this confusion the ongoing evolution of the complicated algorithms used by search engines, and you can often wake up feeling that everything that you knew yesterday is no longer relevant today. It is hard work to stay on top of all the latest developments and updates, but that’s what you’ve got to do in order to be on the front-foot in relation to your digital marketing initiatives.
Essentially what you are trying to achieve through improving your SEO performance is to promote your website, boosting your ranking on search engine results, and build the online presence and brand of your business.
One of the tactics that you will often hear about is an “off-site strategy” and that is what we are going to focus on in this article.
What is an off-site strategy?
Including off-site initiatives in your digital marketing strategy is where you acquire inbound links to your website’s pages, as well as leveraging social media channels to encourage users to engage with and share content on your website. These are factors that increase ranking results on search engines.
Blogging
This is one of the most common and effective off-site strategies. By creating unique, authoritative content that engages with your target audience, links from the blog to your website will boost search engine performance.
Social Media
Expand your reach and audience by using social media channels to encourage engagement with content on your website. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ all offer valuable engagement tools. It also helps if you actively engage in these various channels – posting comments, sharing other people’s posts, engaging in discussions. This type of active engagement is proving to be much more effective than simply using your social media channels to broadcast corporate marketing messages.
Bookmarking
Social bookmarking sites such ass Digg, Delicious, and StumbleUpon are regularly indexed by search engines and can help boost search engine ranking results. A useful tool to help you efficiently bookmark your content is the extension app IFTTT (which stands for “If This Then That”) which enables you to set up a rule such as “If I post content on Twitter then automatically bookmark it to Digg, Delicious, and StumbleUpon.” By investing a bit of time in setting up these rules all of your bookmarking can be done without you even thinking about it.
Online communities
Reddit is a great example of a hive of online communities using a common platform to engage with their topics of interest. Most links from Reddit are “no-follow” (which means they won’t directly assist your SEO performance) but by engaging with active online communities you can create discussion and debate that will drive genuine traffic to your site.
Off-site strategies are a step that comes after you have completed your on-page SEO initiatives, so make sure you aren’t putting the cart before the horse. Digital marketing is not easy, it is not simple, but it is worth doing.