Build links to build reputations!
“What will you do in off-page SEO?”, “What is link building in SEO?”, “Is it really needed?” - These are common questions that most MSMEs ask whenever we discuss SEO activities.
To understand what are the major aspects of off-page SEO, link building strategies and how it helps to build the ranking of the website, read on.
Let us consider that you intend to buy a laptop and you know that one of your friends is an expert when it comes to IT and would definitely be able to recommend some suitable options. If this friend directs you to someone in his network who deals in laptops, you are more likely to trust this person because of your friend’s recommendation. This same analogy applies to off-page SEO too. Off-page SEO is nothing but a list of activities done to increase the credibility (domain authority) of a particular website in the eyes of search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. Building this credibility is essential so that the website is shown more often to the target audience and it ranks on the first page, thereby getting more and more relevant traffic.
Now let us see what activities are involved in off-page SEO?
Off-page activities broadly involve link building. Link building means getting more and more websites of higher quality (domain authority) to point towards your website. In the above example, one of your friends (who is an expert in IT) directed you to a particular vendor and you considered buying from the vendor. Similarly, if more of your friends direct you to the same vendor then chances of you buying from that vendor increase This is exactly how link building works. Higher the number of links pointing towards your website, the higher the chances of it ranking better as compared to your competitors.
Let us look at some of the good practices that can be used for link building for MSMEs :
● Guest posting: These are online portals or websites that invite experts on various topics and publish their interviews or their perspectives about the industry. These portals have to be selected based on the target audience and the topics that such websites write about. Along with this post, the portal would link to your website, thus communicating your authority in the particular domain.
● Article submission: There are many online sites that allow the submission of articles on any topic and these are then categorised based on your industry. Here, we can provide a link to the website for which SEO is being done while submitting the articles.
● Directory submission: There are various directories that allow the websites to be submitted for different categories.
Link submissions or back-link generation as it is generally referred to can be both organic and paid activities. MSMEs need to understand that there are ample organic opportunities to get the links and they need not always go for paid links right from the beginning.