Off page SEO is one of the important factors to build an audience for your website, product or services. Having a product or service but no audience or customers to buy it will not be a worthy business. You have a beautiful house to sell but none of the potential buyers knows about it. what will happen?
That house will convert into an abandoned house. Similarly, if you just right a rich, high quality content but you don’t share it with the right audience, your content will not reach quickly.
Google algorithm is smart. It can identify the good or bad content based on certain parameters or metrics that it follows. You at least need to follow on page seo rules where you write content which Google bots can understand and rank accordingly but at the same time, doing off page for your content can help Google, trust your content more and produce the content to the relevant audience or customers.
This article will focus on some of the key metrics that you should work on while doing off page SEO
So, what are those key metrics of an Off page SEO? We often get questions and doubts from people doing SEO for the first time. These questions are related to the following metrics.
- What are backlinks?
- What are Do-follow and No-Follow backlinks?
- How to build healthy backlinks?
- What is anchor text?
- Meaning by link juice?
- What is relevancy?
And many more questions like that. So, let’s discuss this in detail and answer them with detailed examples.
Table of Contents
What are backlinks in Off Page SEO?
Let us take a real life example to explain this. In India, Sharma surname is very famous. In hindi we call it as “Sharma g ka launda.”. This guy, who is the son of a person whose surname is Sharma.
Now, why only the Sharma surname is so popular as “Sharma g ka launda” and not others like “Sinha G ka launda” or “Srivastava G ka launda”?
It’s because more people are talking about Sharma G and nobody talks about the rest of the surname hence Sharma is famous and Sinha or Srivastava is not famous.
Now, let’s relate this practically. The people who are talking about Sharma surname, they are in plenty. These people are a backlink to that Sharma’s son. In every state and cities of India, there are people who are talking about Sharma’s Son either through meme, jokes or anything. So, they are backing this surname more as compare to any other surname.
So, when you create any website, you need to get this kind of backing which people technically call it as a backlink. We do this to show to the crawler, to make them realize that people are talking about us, so much, you need to let other people also know that we have something special.
So, people build backlink. They want their website mention. But, getting a random mention from anyone or at any place can be dangerous.
Imagine a situation. A house was robbed and everyone starts telling that “Sharma’s son is a thief” just because they love taking his name everywhere. Isn’t Sharma’s son in trouble? Wasn’t this backing of Sharma’s son a wrong choice? Yes, it was.
Similar is the case when you try getting a mention or a backlink from any random or low trusted website. Suppose you are an educational website but porn websites are talking about you. Isn’t this combination “an alert”?
These examples may be clearing your doubts a little bit. Isn’t this clear yet? Let us know in the comment section below. We will elaborate on them in comments.
Technical Definition of Backlink
So, how do we define backlinks in SEO world?
According to Wikipedia, A backlink for a given web resource is a link from some other website (the referrer) to that web resource (the referent).
Getting more technical, a backlink is basically a hyperlinking of your website link on some another website.
What is hyperlinking?
Hyperlinking is a format in which you insert a link into any text or image, which when clicked, takes the user to the linked website. Here the text or the image is called the anchor text or image.
THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF HYPERLINK (On clicking this, a new link to our website’s blog will open.
We will explain anchor text in details when you go further in this article. So have patience and read till the end to understand the SEO world at crystal clear levels.
What are Dofollow and NoFollow Backlinks in Off Page SEP?
There are two types of backlinks when you are doing off page seo. One is
- Dofollow backlink and other is
- No follow backlinks.
To understand this do follow and No follow backlinks, we will again take an example of our favorite “Sharma G ka Launda”.
Imagine, there are 100 people who are talking about “Sharma g ka launda”. Out of that 100 people, when 25 people talk about Sharma’s Son, none of the listeners takes the discussion further on the hot topic of talking about “Sharma g ka launda” . So the buzz happens but it isn’t making Sharma’s son so popular and finally, Sharma’s Son doesn’t come to know that he becomes popular among those 25 people. He gets noticed among a crowd but it doesn’t add to his popularity to a deeper extent.
But, the rest of the 75 people are like influencers and when they talk about it, other audience listen to it and go further in trying to discuss Sharma’s son and makes Sharma’s son popular which he comes to know and feel excited that “yay! people are coming and taking my autograph because I am popular”
So, this story can be related to dofollow and nofollow backlinks. The 25 people where Nofollow backlink while the rest of the 75 people where Do follow backlink.
If you couldn’t relate this story properly to dofollow and nofollow backlinks then let us know in the comments below. We will try to make it more clear in the comment section.
Technical definition of Do follow backlinks
Dofollow backlinks are those links where the off page SEO benefits are transferred to the hyperlinked website from the sourced website. To make it more clear, read further.
Suppose, a website has a high traffic and it mentioned a keyword eg “best t-shirt” and hyperlink your website on that keyword with a dofollow backlink (Or hyperlink) then, a search engine crawler will go further and access your website for checking the relevancy of that anchored text on which your website was hyperlinked and analyze your content. It will try to check how relevant is your landing page that was hyperlinked on the sourced website. How relevant it is for the keyword “best t-shirt” on which your website was hyperlinked.
It will also analyze user behavior, their time spent on your website after clicking on “Best t-shirt” and coming to your website. All metrics and ranking factor would be judge through that single dofollow backlink and if results calculated are found good then the search engine can rank you for that particular keyword or if you are already ranking for that keyword then your rank will start improving.
Isn’t that great to have such dofollow backlink?
So why to have a Nofollow backlink? Let’s discuss this also
Need for Nofollow Link while doing Off Page SEO.
Nofollow link doesn’t add direct benefit to your SEO. but it can help you
- Increase your traffic
- That could lead to many important marketing benefits like lead generation, fan following,
- Chances of getting dofollow by visitors who can give your high-quality article, a mention in their blog after reading your article.
Nofollow link is given by webmasters of a particular blog to tell the crawler that they don’t take the guarantee of the linked website’s trust hence the crawler obeys their rule and don’t go further in crawling your website via the nofollow hyperlinking/backlinking.
You should follow the principle of diversity. I mean it is important to use Nofollow links for your inbound link profile. It will look suspicious if all inbound links are Dofollow and it is not natural. Don’t you think so? Therefore, you need to balance your links and use both Dofollow and Nofollow links. A healthy mix of Nofollow links can even give a good influence on Dofollow links.
How to write a dofollow Backlink?
Dofollow link is a natural link. If you don’t mention any rel tag = nofollow then it is considered a dofollow link by default. Let us find out how to create a hyperlink or backlink for a dofollow backlink.
For example, I want to give a backlink to an ecommerce website for their keyword as “online store” so I will write the dofollow link as
<a href=“https://snetiara.com/”>online store</a>
This is how we give a dofollow link to a website. Keep this syntax in mind. It will help you in link building in the future.
How to write a Nofollow Backlink?
When you have to give a nofollow backlink then it is important to mention a rel tag in the syntax with a nofollow command otherwise the default value that is dofollow will be considered and crawled by the search engine crawler.
The syntax of a Nofollow backlink is written as (Taking the same example as above)
<a rel=”nofollow href=”https://snetiara.com/”>online store</a>
Google have recently noticed that they will count Nofollow links to boost PR for your page. But it depends on where the link is placed and the quality of it. If you place it at the begging of your text, it will give more impact than if you post it at the bottom of the page.
What are the anchor text and how should you decide your anchor text?
Anchor text is the word over which you hyperlink your website’s URL. If you are doing a dofollow backlink then always have your focus or as we say, target keyword for which you want to rank your website, must be your anchor keyword.
Before starting your link building strategy, always do your keyword research for which you can easily get ranked. You must do a competitor analysis before starting your link building strategy.
You can use a free tool like ubersuggest for competitor analysis. We have explained the proper way to do the competitor analysis using ubersuggest in snehiltalks blog.
What is link juice concept in Off Page SEO?
Link juice can be called as a vote that your website gets from another website which can be in your niche or any other. It is like a promotion that you get and a search engine understand that you are trusted website. The more link juice you get for your website, the better will be your seo practice.
Link juice is passed on when you get a dofollow link from any other website. So, it is always good to have a more dofollow link but at the same time, having a diverse distribution of dofollow as well as the nofollow link is important.
Off-page seo checklist
When you start your off page campaign that is more of a link building, you must have to keep these points set in your off page SEO practices.
- Directory Submissions
- Social Bookmark Submissions
- Article Submissions
- Guest Blogging
- Slideshare Submissions
- Image Submissions
- Video Submissions
- Answering Sites
- Business Listing Sites
- Press Release Submissions
- Classified Submissions.
Find all relevant websites where you can
- Submit your link or
- Put an answer talking about your product or services.
- Submit infographics related to your offerings with backlinks
- Explainer videos.
- Business listing on google my business or any classified.
and all possible ways to increase your mention but you need to be warned here.
Don’t build a link that could get you in trouble. Over link building can be declared as spam which could bring penalization for your website by search engines like google and hence your website won’t get ranked.
You can download really good SEO Template for building your SEO plan and strategy from digital Akash marketing blog. They will be really helpful for you.
Create links at a speed that would look natural. It is true that sometimes, somethings go viral but when things go viral, the linking or backlinks generated are in millions in few hours or days. You cannot identify the Nofollow and dofollow link distributions quickly but Google is smart enough to understand the difference between spam and natural link building. Don’t try to create a fake viral link building strategy and bring your domain into trouble.
Read More- Different ways to make backlinks
Final verdict
Off page SEO as well as on page seo are important practices for getting your online property ranked high on google search engine. Organic traffic is like free money if you are monetizing this traffic because, on a search engine, the user is always in intent to buy or subscribe to any services or product. Hence, whenever you start an online venture, have a seo expert right beside you to have a bright future for your online business or plans.
If you have any query or doubt after reading this blog, do let us know in the comments below. We will quickly get you a perfect solution for the same.
