Off page SEO is key to driving traffic to your website.
The strategy factors into building the popularity that your website needs to get people to visit it and increase its rankings on search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and so on.
If you know how to start a blog or create a website, but don’t know how to drive traffic to it, this guide is for you.
There’re many ways to drive traffic to your website and off page SEO forms the basis.
The strategy is a key aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) to promote a business website off and online.
Most importantly, the use of off page SEO techniques can increase the visibility and ranking positions of your website on the search engine result page (SERP).
SEO may seem scary, but that isn’t true.
Once you know what you’re doing, optimizing your content for SEO is the easiest thing to do and drives massive traffic to your website.
But before addressing what are the off page SEO techniques, let’s first see what off page SEO is all about?
What is off page SEO?
Some people define off page SEO as link building.
But I disagree.
If you look at Neil Patel’s definition of off page SEO, you’ll realize that the task includes what you and other people do outside your website to increase how the website ranks on search engines.
Similarly, to MOZ, off page SEO is an action you or others take outside your website to improve your rankings on the SERP.
Based on these two definitions, there are several things you can do outside your website apart from link building, which directly affect your rankings.
For example, when you share your blog posts on Facebook regularly, your traffic will increase.
Although Facebook might not give you a backlink, being the largest social media network, there are chances you get a significant amount of traffic from there.
Off-page SEO, however, is an activity that happens outside your website, but which has an SEO effect on your website.
Whether you’re aware of the activities or not, they all affect your web traffic.
All the clicks, likes, shares, and comments, that your website gets from other channels, contribute to its rankings.
Google takes note of all the external activities and uses them to determine the rankings of your website.
So, when you use off page SEO techniques effectively, the engagement rates of your website increase, and Google uses that to rank your website.
A big challenge to face
If you study the reasons why most bloggers fail, you’ll realize that the genesis of all the major challenges in digital marketing is SEO.
Because people have different policies regarding their websites, most off page SEO techniques can be a bit difficult.
Assuming you send a guest post to SimpleFactOnline, you have no power to get the article published on the site if it doesn’t meet up with the required standards.
So, when you’re just starting, off page SEO techniques may be tasking.
But you don’t have to give up.
By the time you finish reading this guide, I’m damn sure, you will get over the problem.
Why need off page SEO
Off page SEO answers search engines’ concerns about the relevance, trustworthiness, and authority of your website.
When you are working so hard to optimize your website, any SEO you skip can be the reason why your rankings haven’t improved.
On Google alone, there’re over 200 SEO ranking efforts you need to make to improve your rankings.
And if you don’t take the right step at the right time, the whole exercise can be annoying.
Sometimes, some SEO efforts won’t improve anything on your website because the majority of them are just a bunch of speculations.
No wonder experts have divided opinions about SEO techniques. Hence, SEO ranking factors are unequivocal.
The controversy is based on the fact that search engine algorithms are not fixed.
For this reason, the relevance, trustworthiness, authority, and shareability of a website are the bone of contention in off page SEO.
And if you want to optimize your website for these qualities, then you have to know what are the off page SEO techniques to use?
Off page SEO techniques
There’re different off page SEO techniques you can use to get quality backlinks from high authority websites and improve your rankings on Google.
And these include the following:
#1. Create a brand identity
Your website must be representing something – a concept or experience. So, how can you bring that into reality?
It’s better you see your website as a business platform rather than a hobby.
Only in that manner, you can commit yourself to invest in your idea and setting up a good structure, getting the best digital marketing resources, and beginning to operate as an organized business firm.
Read 14 powerful ways to create a brand identity that can send you to a global push.
Brand identity, however, serves as the number one off page SEO technique but gains less attention.
When people come across your website, what can they see from the concept to make them identify themselves as your target audience?
What factors make you different from the others?
All this suggests that conversion can take place through every element of your website.
And now that the customers want to connect with real people in real-time, you have to be the brand yourself.
#2. Get in Google my business
Google my business can be used to list your website and showcase your products and services on Google for free.
The tool was made to lead potential customers from the SERP and Maps directly to your website.
Having signed up for Google my business, when users google a query that is related to your business, all the necessary information about your business will appear on the SERP.
#3. Publishing viral content
Your web traffic can increase when you publish and share viral content.
Readers that come across interesting content will take it upon themselves to share the content, while other bloggers or web owners link back to it.
So, if you want readers to share your post or link back to it, ensure you publish content that adds value to life. Such must be fresh, unique, well-researched, and SEO optimized.
In the cause of doing this, your organic traffic will increase.
#4. Send outreach
Each time you publish evergreen content, endeavor to send outreach to other popular markers in your industry.
The fastest way to do this is to tag relevant people on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with your post.
You can also use hashtags to reach out to people who might have an interest in the content. This off page SEO technique can also trigger a backlink.
#5. Grant an interview
Granting people in your industry an interview can make you easily get backlinks from them.
You can select a few of your group members on Facebook or Twitter and write them about the interview.
When you share the URL of the interview with them, they will be eager to link back to it on your website.
#6. Leverage guest blogging
The guest blogging technique continues to be one of the available options in off page SEO.
It can be used to connect with people in your industry and attract quality backlinks from them.
Read how to find guest blogging opportunities to learn more about this strategy.
To avoid being rejected, ensure you understand the guest blogging policy of the website before sending your post to them.
Find a list of over 100 Nigerian Blogs that accept guest posts across various categories.
With well-researched and SEO optimized content, you can always get your guest posts approved.
#7. Article submissions
Since content length has become a serious SEO ranking factor, article submissions have also gained prominence.
Content marketers that can’t write extensively accept articles on their websites and you can find a backlink opportunity from such websites.
If you have good content, you can embed your link on it and submit it to any high authority website accepting articles.
#8. Increase social media engagement
Customer social media engagement is one of the keys off page SEO techniques to make your website popular on the internet.
Unlike a few other aforementioned techniques, a website’s social engagement rate is a ranking factor.
For this reason, you must make it a good practice to share your posts on Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Search engines use the rate at which readers engage with your content across different social media platforms to determine its popularity.
However, it’s expected of every website to prove it link-worthiness by gaining popularity on social media.
#9. Social bookmarking
Social bookmarking is one of the best off page SEO techniques you can use to send traffic to your website.
You can get backlinks from the site if you use this strategy effectively.
You have the chance to lead people to your website from any social bookmarking site you use when they click on your links.
There are a few numbers of great social bookmarking sites that you can use to promote your website.
And these include:
- StumbleUpon
- ScoopIt
They all have very high domain authority (DA) to boost your rankings.
#10. Use web 2.0
Web 2.0 is a collaborative tool that allows your audience and other bloggers to participate in promoting your ideas in real-time.
When people like, share, and comment on your posts and you reciprocate the gesture, there is going to be a big chain of command that looks like a spider web between you and the others.
In a nutshell, this off-page SEO strategy is used for extending the responsiveness of a website in terms of social engagement, collaboration, and cooperation to distribute knowledge, information, idea, and experience.
The prominent web 2.0 sites include:
- YouTube
Other web 2.0 applications for effective off page SEO techniques include:
- Podcasting
- Blogging
- Vlogging
- Social bookmarking
- Social networking Social media
- RSS feed
- Wikis
- Reviews or star rating sites.
Any of these tools can be used for the off page SEO of your website in Nigeria.
#11. Broken link research
Broken link research is one of the most effective off page SEO techniques that trend.
But because the technique involves a long process, many people don’t consider it in their off page SEO optimization effort.
At every point in time, every website experiences a broken link scenario because the owners don’t have control over the other website.
Assuming a website links to an external page and subsequently, the page URL is altered, the website linking to that page will experience a broken link error.
Broken link errors can also occur due to a misspelled URL, expired hosting or domain, improper files transfer during a migration process, or when a page that a website links to is not redirected after alteration.
Meanwhile, linking to an external page is to help visitors learn more about a subject. But if the visitors click on the reference links and discover that the links are dead, it annoys them.
Google may not penalize a website that has broken links. But because poor user experience easily drives visitors away, it is very necessary to fix the problem.
So, any website suffering from broken links would appreciate whatever good replacement you can offer.
This is where the opportunity comes from. You can take the following steps to grab the opportunity.
- Do a backlink analysis of any target website of your choice.
- Find links that are dead on that website.
- Get a replacement.
- Contact the owner via his email address.
- Tell him about your research and offer the replacement as appropriate.
This is the skyscraper approach of conducting broken link research on a website, which you like to get a backlink from.
#12. Join forum websites
Joining forum sites can also improve both your traffic and rankings.
To take advantage of any forum community you join, ensure you contribute to threads that are relevant to your niche.
You can take it upon yourself to solve up to 5 issues raised in each forum. And do more replying than creating new threads.
In the table below you can find examples of high DA and PR forum websites where you can place your links.
| S/N | FORUM SITES | DA | PA | DF (%) | NF (%) |
| 1. | https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/ | 92 | 72 | 90 | 10 |
| 2. | https://www.addthis.com/forum/ | 93 | 56 | 91 | 9 |
| 3. | https://bbpress.org/forums/ | 61 | 55 | 82 | 18 |
| 4. | https://www.careerbuilder.com/ | 84 | 70 | 54 | 46 |
| 5. | https://www.chronicle.com/forums | 80 | 55 | 96 | 4 |
| 6. | https://www.nairaland.com/ | 81 | 62 | 83 | 17 |
| 7. | https://www.naijaloaded.com/ | 34 | 48 | 80 | 20 |
| 8. | https://www.naijapals.com/ | 42 | 52 | 100 | 0 |
| 9. | https://www.naijapals.com/ | 76 | 42 | 70 | 30 |
| 10. | https://www.naijahotjobs.com/ | 25 | 48 | 81 | 19 |
#13. Submit to blog directories
Blog directory submission is one of the fastest off page SEO techniques to build backlinks to your website or blog.
If you use this strategy effectively, the result is amazing.
The only problem with this technique is it takes time before you begin to see its effects on your rankings.
In the table below, find examples of high DA and PA blog directory websites where you can submit your domain.
| S/N | BLOG DIRECTORY SITES | DA | PA | DF (%) | NF (%) |
| 1. | https://industrydirectory.mjbizdaily.com | 64 | 42 | 87 | 13 |
| 2. | https://www.blogarama.com/ | 61 | 56 | 93 | 7 |
| 3. | https://directory.entireweb.com/ | 52 | 46 | 31 | 69 |
| 4. | https://www.nigeriagalleria.com/Free_Submission.html | 40 | 29 | 77 | 23 |
| 5. | https://www.bloggingfusion.com/country/nigeria | 38 | 29 | 98 | 2 |
#14. Leave comments on other websites
Another way to drive traffic to your website is to comment on blog posts you read. This strategy is one of the best off page SEO techniques you should adopt.
If you want your comment to be approved, ensure you don’t spam the blog post.
Read the post you’re commenting on very well and make a relevant contribution by adding more points to what has been discussed. You can even use the medium to ask further questions on the subject.
Don’t place your link in the text area of the comment.
The best place to place your link while commenting on a blog post is the Website form area, which is provided within the comment section.
#15. Use question and answer websites
You can equally sign up on authority question and answer websites. That is another powerful off page SEO strategy to send massive traffic to your website or blog.
Look for questions that are related to your field on those websites and offer your best answers to the audience.
Embed your links in every answer you offer to make the audience have access to the main source of the information on your own website.
Examples of question and answer websites include:
| S/N | QUESTION AND ANSWER WEBSITES | DA | PA | ALEXA | DF (%) | NF (%) |
| 1. | https://quora.com/ | 93 | 77 | 242 | 81 | 19 |
| 2. | https://answers.yahoo.com/ | 92 | 72 | 12 | 48 | 52 |
| 3. | https://ehow.com | 92 | 73 | 6,872 | 70 | 30 |
| 4. | https://answerbag.com/ | 66 | 52 | 45,475 | 91 | 9 |
| 5. | https://blurtit.com | 62 | 58 | 34,157 | 46 | 54 |
#16. Use video submission sites
Shoot great videos with the purpose to guide or market your business to your audience.
Then upload the videos to popular video submission websites like YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, Vine, and MetaCafe. They all provide you with high-quality backlinks and traffic.
#17. Use image submission sites
This technique is also good for off-page SEO. Just like the video submission website, image submission sites can also send traffic to your website.
But before you upload your images to any website, it’s very important you optimize the image first. The optimization process of an image include:
- Resize image to meet the standard.
- Compress the image.
- Name image with the right keyword.
- Save image with the right format, PNG or JEPG.
- Add proper title, caption, description and tags.
Then upload the image to popular image submission sites like MediaFire, Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr and Imgur.
All of them can send massive traffic to your website or blog in a blink of an eye.
#18. Share documents
#19. Press release submissions
#20.
Conclusion on Off-Page SEO Techniques
If you need to know what are the off page SEO techniques to gain quality backlinks, traffic and increase your connections with potential customers online, you have the best answer in this guide.
This post contains the best off page SEO techniques in Nigeria.
Making it a duty to optimize your blog or website with the aforementioned strategies can make Google grace your overall efforts.
These off page SEO techniques attract quality backlinks and traffic from possible websites with high DA and drastically increase your connection base.
In case there are additional techniques worthy of mentioning, please endeavor to talk about them in your comment below.
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