You can surely drive lots of quality traffic to your website from Google and other search engines by building quality links only. With this post, you will know what is OFF page SEO and how to build high quality backlinks for your website, which will help you gain top rankings for targeted keywords on Google. SEO is basically categorised into two ways. On-page SEO makes your website search engine friendly but off-page SEO improves your website’s position in Search Engine Results Page (SERP). 9 out of 10 bloggers focus on on-page optimization and ignore off page optimization. That’s the reason why they struggle to increase their search engine traffic. If you’re also one among them, start focusing on off page activities. This detailed off page SEO techniques 2023 guide will helps you how to do it the right way.

What is off page SEO?

It is nothing but improving your website positions in Search Engine Results Page (SERP). It tells Google what others think about your site. Based on the links that you have for your site, search engine assume that you have great content. Links are the new web currency. But, most of the people assume that off page is all about just link building. No, it is not just about links. Then what else it includes? It is a combination of a lot of factors that include:

Social media metrics (Facebook likes, Pinterest pins, Tweets etc) User engagement (comments) Social bookmarking Forum posting and a lot of other factors.

If you want to boost your search rankings in 2023, this ultimate guide is just for you where you’ll discover some of the proven off page activities 2023.

Off page SEO Techniques for beginners in 2023

Let me start this tutorial by telling you one thing: it’s all about links. Without backlinks, it’s impossible to rank on first page search results. Did you know that 99% of the sites that rank on top Google search results have at least 1 external link pointing to the site? Do you know, almost 100 billion searches are made on Google every month for services, content and products? And half of those searches are coming from mobile devices. Backlinks are the most important factor when it comes to content marketers and bloggers. Why? Because search engines trust your website more if your site has any authoritative relevant backlinks. When Google looks for fresh content, it indexes your new pages and makes it available for search users. When relevant search queries are triggered, Google uses some algorithm factors to determine whose pages will rank. This we call as Google ranking factors in SEO terminology. Here are the most important factors that Google considers while ranking:

The number of linking domains. The number of domains linking to your site is one of the most important ranking factors Domain Authority (DA) of a linking page. The links from the high DA website is considered more helpful than the links from low DA sites. Yes, try to get links from high DA websites. The number of linking page. It is always recommended to have more links from individual domains rather than from a single domain. Authority of linking domain. A link from low Page Authority (PA) page on a high DA site is better than from a low DA one. Count number of dofollow links. As Google officially stated that it won’t count nofollow links while ranking, it considers dofollow links. Contextual links. The links within the content of the page are worth more than the links in a sidebar. Links from homepage. The links from a homepage of a linking domain carry more strength than those on one of its pages. Link relevancy. The links from  pages related to your pages topic carry more relevancy for search engines.

Google views your website as more valuable than others if you have many backlinks from authoritative websites. Google analyzes the questions about links like, where does the link comes from?, quality of the link, how fresh the link is? Etc.. That being said, well how to get those authoritative links?

  1. Guest blogging: No doubt, guest blogging takes you so far and helps a lot in acquiring great links  The only challenging task here is, you need to do lot of research about the topic. After that, you need to find out the top blogs in your niche and submit your pitch. If they accept and yes your article gets published.
  2. Broken link building: To earn the links, this method is pretty much faster than guest blogging. Do you know, lots of links on some authority blogs are actually dead. Why it happens? If hosting expires, during file transfer or migration of the sites, links are bound to break. The one good point is broken pages don’t affect your site’s ranking. But it does give bad experience to user. If  your customer service is bad, then 85% of your business could be lost according to the Sacramento Design Network. So, conduct a backlink analysis on your niche websites. Find broken links, contact the owner and let them know about their dead links. There are chances that they will do a return favour by including your link on their website or you can offer replacement link too.
  3. Create compelling infographics: It always gives impressive results provided they are created with great information. If you have budget to afford, you can use Canva or Visual.ly for professional infographic designers. If you want to attract huge number of audience and acquire authoritative back links, then infographics works the best. Because, the ideal customers respond to visual content better than the plain text. Infographics goes viral if you give sufficient promotion to it. When people share your infographics, it continuously generates organic traffic to your blog. Well, you generated backlinks. What’s next?

Improve your social media signals

Social is the NEW SEO. If you want to improve your site’s overall off site SEO, make sure to improve your social shares. Here’s the image that tells you how social media impacts your SEO. Know your target audience by engaging more on social media. By contributing regularly to discussions, you will understand where your audience hangs out more and at what time. Here are some interesting social media stats that will blow your mind away.

As of October 2021, over 4.55 billion people are active on social media An average, each person spends around 2 hours and 25 minutes on social media Twitter reached over 211 million daily active users in 2021 LinkedIn has more than 800 million active users around the world

Stunning social media stats, right? That’s why you can’t ignore social media. Social media presence helps to grow your business and gets you more backlinks. The web is for building relationships, expressing and sharing ideas, helping each other with useful and helpful information.

Start answering on Quora

SEO legends like Rand Fishkin, Neil Patel etc are using Quora to boost their visibility and it’s undoubtedly the best way to improve your site’s SEO. Quick note: BTW you can follow me on Quora from here. I mostly write about SEO related stuff so if you’re interested in boosting your off site SEO or overall search traffic, it will be useful for you! If you are not using Quora then probably you are not effectively putting your efforts for your overall SEO. Now you may be wondering what is this Quora? It is the place where you can get the best answers for any type of question. I should say, it is the gold mine for SEO. Be it your marketing campaign  or for link building or for enhancing your online brand, Quora is the best place to start. And using Quora is very simple.

Create a killing profile: The content you write under your profile and the headline you add should speak a lot about you. Set the profile and follow topics: Once you are done with your profile settings then find topics related to your business and start following it. Write answers: You can always any question and also request concerned expert to answer it. However, if you are looking to enhance your business, then it is good to write answers related to your niche business. Sometimes, it also helps in connecting with right people.

That being said, you may be wondering  how to use Quora to improve your overall website’s off site SEO. Here are few quick Quora tips for you!

  1. Showcase your expertise: The answers you write on Quora should show your expertise to the readers. Answer only those questions that are relevant to your business as your intention is to build up your business. Once the readers trust your answers and get benefitted, they will start requesting you to answer their questions.
  2. Google displays your answer in search results: It is one of the best ways to reach to your audience. If your answer is accepted by many people in the form of upvotes, Google shows your answer in search results whenever user types for related query.
  3. A long term strategy to drive traffic: If your answer is crafted very nicely and provides in-depth answer then it generates good amount of traffic ever.
  4. Know where you are mentioned: Follow all the topic that are related to your business. In this way, you can know, if you are mentioned anywhere.
  5. Learn from other experts: Most of the people spend a pretty good amount of time on Quora. You can learn many tips from them to grow your business.
  6. Provides sales opportunities: If you are regularly interacting with your readers, you will find sales opportunities too. It will help you to generate leads.

Start making YouTube videos

You might ask, how YouTube can improve your blog’s off site SEO? That’s a great question. Let me be clear about it: firstly, YouTube is the 2nd biggest search engine after Google. Secondly, links that you get from YouTube videos (meta description) are valuable and they help you improve your blog SEO. YouTube is so trending these days. You might have heard many people earning handsome amount of money from their YouTube videos. And of course, it’s not that much easy but with constant effort it is definitely possible. All you need is creativity to attract audience, patience and perseverance. Here’s a quick review of how YouTube search works. Here are the few tips that will be helpful to you in this process;

You should know what’s popular in your field right now to get an idea. Have your own way to showcase your skills. It should represent your personality. Don’t think of driving traffic or making money right from the first day. Instead show your passion in making new and creative content every day or once in every week. Your videos show tell audience how you are different from others. Quality matters always. Higher the quality, higher will be the view count. Before promoting your channel, make sure you have at least 10 to 15 good quality videos and gained good number of subscribers. Make sure your subscribers know when they can expect next video. For example, “once in a week” or “once in 10 days” or “alternative days”. Keep a compelling video thumbnail.

It takes minimum 1 to 2 years to gain recognition. So, be patient. Remember, YouTube is a community. If you want to get other’s attention, you must give attention to other channels.

Find blogs that do weekly roundup posts

Here’s the quick tip to improve your overall off site SEO: find and land on weekly round up posts. To be successful in blogging world, you need to build relationship with others. If you build relationships with fellow bloggers, it will help you to promote your blog and get traffic. You can do this by participating in blog link roundups. Link roundups is the best way to get other bloggers’ attention to discover your content. To find link roundups in your niche, then simply type “weekly link roundup + your niche keyword” or “mashups + your niche keyword”. Make sure you follow these points while promoting your content through roundups:

Write killer content that compels readers to read your article. Build relationships with other bloggers. The one success mantra in online business. Inform our fellow bloggers only to your best posts.

So find link opportunities and participate in them is the fastest way to build backlinks and to boost your overall SEO in 2023 and beyond.

Create infographics and use appealing images

Did you know that I got a couple of links from the top blog like Neil Patel from one image? So when you’re using appealing and unique images, you are tend to attract quality links from other sites that will definitely improve your overall off site SEO. The trend has changed. People are vexed up with text oriented content. Some people tries to stuff content with keyword and build spammy backlinks. So, it is important to produce quality content to get recognized by Google’s SEO. And the easiest way is to create infographics. These are the mostly liked and shared content and beware there are bad infographics too. You can make your design attractive with good color combinations, charts, icons and graphs along with the most important data. With tools like Canva, you can create infographics very easily and can also measure how well your infographic is performing.

Focus on your keywords

I know, I know what you’re thinking now. Keyword research is definitely an on page SEO factor. But here’s the one thing that you need to remember. If you are not careful in doing keyword targeting, you will be attracting wrong links from other sites (remember, the link relevancy is a great off site SEO factor). So if you want to get more out of this activity, target the right keywords. The #1 factor that controls SEO is the keywords you choose. If you want to do great content campaign, keywords are the essential building blocks for it. The below diagram depicts the more accurate view of on page SEO. The primary keywords accounts for 40% of on-page SEO where as related keywords accounts for 17.5% of it. If you want to improve the organic traffic to your site, keyword research is very important.  Pick up the keywords related to your niche. While creating content, use those keywords around it. For example, you want to write on “healthy nutritious food diet”. Enter this main keyword in Google keyword planner search bar and click on “Get ideas”. Here are the phrases related to your topic. You can tailor your content by knowing the phrases and search terms that your users use while searching. If you truly want to improve the search performance for a given keyword, use your primary keywords in title tag, use LSI keywords in your content. Never ever mention your primary keyword again and again in your content. Google sees that as over-optimization and penalizes you. You may be wondering how to get those LSI keywords (Synonyms)? Well, there are many tools to find out LSI keywords for your niche topic. Go to LSIgraph.com and input your seed keyword. For example, “online movie tickets” Solve the captcha and click on “Generate” button. And it will instantly give you a ton of LSI keywords that you can use to create ideal content for your blog audience to generate more search traffic. Apart from LSI keywords, focus on long-tail keywords to improve your search rankings. Once you are done tailoring keywords for your content, start focusing on getting authority backlinks.

Save your site from Google penalties

If you want to sustain your site’s ranking position, backlinks are really important. But links affect the search performance either in better way or makes worse. Backlinks have the strongest impact on search engines. It is very important to save your site from Google penalties because recovering from penalties is very difficult. Google mainly focusses on user optimization and valuable content. How to stay away from Google penalty radar? Perform full backlink analysis and it helps to analyze which links are good and which are bad. Here is how you can ensure that your site is free from getting penalized.

  1. Perform site audit: You can use tools like Semrush (#1 SEO tool I HIGHLY recommend for bloggers) for finding and fixing website SEO related issues. You can find out all the reasons why your site is not ranking well on Google. That being said, I’ve written an in-depth tutorial on how to conduct an SEO audit using Semrush.
  2. Optimize your content: Content is the king always. You may not use right keywords but if it looks too promotional then nothing can stop it from going viral. Help your audience by creating useful and helpful content. Use visuals in your post, integrate data into your blog posts. Your audience tries to know more about you if you really give them valuable content.
  3. Use different keyword phrases: Once you are done with full backlink analysis and understands from where links are coming, focus on using different keyword phrases, generic content and brand names  in your content so that Google considers your links as natural. Which means your links shouldn’t have exact match keywords in their anchor texts. One tip is use your brand name as anchor text because anyone can share your content and link to it. You can’t control your anchor texts so use your brand name. Make sure you always publish fresh content to enhance your brand in the online world.

Contribute to other sites

Guest blogging is the most effective way to generate quality dofollow backlinks. It’s the surest way to improve your off site SEO without getting any negative rankings. What you get by contributing to other sites?

It helps to build your authority. It can bring you lot of referral traffic. It helps in building links.

While writing guest posts for other sites, don’t link too much to your site. It spoils your relationship with the site owner. Even if you are writing guest post for others, give really awesome content. Low quality guest posting brings extra trouble to you. Here are the few things you need to keep in mind before you guest post on other sites:

Collect list of all sites related to your niche that accepts guest posts. Set up an excel sheet and write each site’s home page domain authority (DA), guest posting guidelines etc. To get more guest posting opportunities related to your niche, type in google with these search strings. “Your seed Keyword” + “guest post” or “intitle: guest post guidelines”. Search on all social media platforms. For example, head over to Twitter page and in search box, you can give “your keyword” + “guest post”. Seriously, it shows you more opportunities than Google search engine. So, you have list of all sites that accepts guest posts. Now, it’s time to know which of these sites bring you more traffic. Go to similarweb.com, and enter the domain of that site where you want to write guest post. This site gives you general idea about site’s popularity. To check more about your guest posting site, observe their blog comments on posts. It gives you information whether site is active or not, up-to-date with current information. Now, it’s time to write an amazing guest post. If you have a topic in your mind, linktally.com will tell you how well the post is going to perform. Another way to determine topic for your guest post is to check which pages has more backlinks. For this, go to link explorer, and enter the site’s URL. Click on “Top pages” tab and check what pages have high Page Authority (PA).

Topic with case studies, detailed how to guides, long lists have more acceptance rate.  What are you looking for? Start writing amazing killer content and promote your stuff.

Submit to directories and forums

Off page SEO techniques help to make your website more popular on the Internet. To get more visibility, submit your stuff to directories and forums. Here are the sites where you can submit your blog content to enhance more visibility.

Social bookmarking sites: These are the best platforms to promote your stuff. When you post on popular social bookmarking sites, it helps in gaining more traffic to your blog. Some of the sites are: stumbleupon, slashdot, digg, technorati. Submit to forums: Make sure that you participate in each forum related to your niche and build connections with community. Make the best use of do-follow forums. Some of the forum sites where you can submit are: blokube, Blog Engage, Indiblogger, bbpress, Warrior forum etc. Blog directory submission: It helps to build quality backlinks. It takes time to get better results but it definitely helps in long run. Select a proper category under each directory and start submitting your posts. Networkedblogs, elecdir are good blog directories to submit posts. Article submission sites: It is always good to submit the articles to high DA directories. If you submit low quality content and has more keyword stuffing, then your article gets rejected. So, create highly unique content. Question and answer sites: You will get good amount of high traffic from question and answer websites.  Join those sites and search for questions related to your niche, give helpful answer to any question. Don’t forget to give your blog link at the end of the answer. You can use the sites like Yahoo answers, Quora, blurtit etc. Share your videos to these sites: If you are a vblogger or any other, submit to these sites to make your videos popular. It is one of the ways to get quality backlinks. The sites which has high DA are: Youtube, vimeo, vine, ustream. Image submission sites: Make sure you optimize your images with the correct URL, title tag before submitting to these sites. Flickr, Instagram, picasa, tumblr, imgur. Submit your infographics: I already mentioned in #3 point how infographics helps in getting backlinks. Make really impressive infographics and submit to these sites. Give reference link to your website. Some of the infographic submission sites are: visual.ly, reddit, submitinfographics.com, infographicsarchive.com. Share to document sites: Create documents related to your niche.Make sure you create unique and helpful pdf or ppt. Upload that in these sites: issuu.com, slideshare, scribd.com.

All the sites mentioned here have high Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA). No doubt, off-page SEO gives better ranking to your website in Google search. Browse more SEO Tutorials:

Ultimate SEO Tutorial For Beginners in 2023 Best On-page SEO Techniques to Get Top Rankings on Google in 2023 Top White Hat SEO Techniques to Boost Search Rankings in 2023 Top Gray Hat SEO Techniques to Uplift Your Website Rankings Black Hat SEO techniques to Avoid at All Cost in 2023

Final thoughts

Off site SEO is NOT just about backlinks as most people think. It involves your overall website trust, authority, social signals and many other things. This detailed guide is written to discuss some of the crucial factors that can improve your overall website authority on Google search.

12 Ways to Create High Quality Backlinks Like a Pro Use These 10 FREE Tools To Find Traffic Of ANY Website In The World Best Semrush Alternatives: Free & Paid Tools Included How to Check If a Website Is Penalized by Google? How to Get Google to Index Your New Website Quickly? Moz vs Semrush: An Honest Comparison Top Ahrefs Alternatives: Free & Paid Tools Best Backlink Checker Tools to Check Backlinks for a Website People Also Search For: How to Rank for These Queries?

Don’t just rely upon on page SEO if you want higher rankings. Whenever you publish a new post, make sure to follow the techniques mentioned inn this guide. Did you like this tutorial, if yes please share it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter & Google plus? Do you have any more tips to boost SEO of a website? Do share your thoughts in the comments below.