The ranking of a website can also be significantly improved by off-site SEO, also known as ‘backlinking’.
Essentially, the more links from other quality online sources to your page, the higher your search engine ranking.
The thinking is that search engines assume your site has valuable content if other sites refer to it.
Quality and quantity
The key consideration when developing a backlink strategy is that the quantity of backlinks is not as important as the quality of the referring site.
In fact, more backlinks are thought to sometimes do more harm to your web rankings.
Considerations in regard to quality include:
- the referring the site’s popularity and authority
- how relevant the linking site’s topic is to the information being linked to
- the currency of the link
- the trustworthiness of the linking site, and
- the number of other hyperlinks on the linking page.
Sites considered low quality include spam sites and some directories.
Offsite links can be categorised into two sections – organic (free) and managed.
Organic
If your site has interesting or authoritative content, people may create links to your site from their blogs, social media or websites.
Managed
This involves a number of approaches that can include:
- organising listings on online directories (free or paid), such as Yellow Pages or local and regional listings
- links from social media channels or your own blog
- hiring an influencer marketer to create links from an online article that endorses your product, service or website
- seeking support from other organisations. For example, you may ask other organisations to help promote community events that your business has organised.
