What is Offsite Search Engine Optimisation?

What is Offsite SEO?

Offsite search engine optimisation is anything you do off your website to improve its ranking. Primarily this is link building, which is getting links from other websites to your website. Google (and other search engines) use links to a website as a form of recommendation and will take these into account when deciding how to rank your website. So how do you get links to your website?

Offsite SEO - How do you get links?

There are both passive and active methods to getting links to your website. Google would prefer your link building to be passive, whereby you focus on writing great content so that people will automatically want to share your website on their own. In other words, if your website is an authority on a particular topic and I am adding info to my own website about that topic (maybe a blog post), I might suggest to my readers to read your web page for further information. This is a true recommendation. The only issue here is that you have little direct control and getting links this way can be a slow process.

Active link building for SEO allows you to get links to your website a lot faster. Some of the methods are:

• Identify websites with similar content that rank well and contact them about linking to your website.
• Setting up profiles on Online Directories.
• Writing Articles with a link to your website and submit to article websites.
• Commenting on Blogs amd Forums, including a link back to your website.
• Sending out Press Releases (including links to your site) to online media sites.
• Build Micro Sites and link them to your website.
• Post to Social Networks with links to your website.

BEWARE: Some methods of Link Building are classified as Black Hat SEO and can result in a Google Penalty.

Offsite or Onsite SEO - what should you focus on?

At Probity Web Marketing we believe we are pretty smart about SEO. However, we don't think that we're smarter than the highly paid team of search experts at Google. So why would we think that we can outsmart them and do search engine optimisation different to how they want us to do it and they won't catch us out. For this reason, we believe it makes a lot more sense to do what Google recommends; which is to develop great websites with great content and structure. So therefore we spend most of our time and effort on onsite SEO.

Now that's not to say that we should neglect offsite SEO. It is important that you set up quality online profiles at respected online directories, post quality information to social media platforms and encourage website visitors to share your website.

One final note on Offsite vs Onsite SEO. If your website has been built correctly, it is your property that you have complete control over. So all the effort and time you spend developing it will benefit you into the future. Conversely, with social networks, online directories and websites that aren't yours, you have no control over. There is no guarantee that these will be around in the future, so therefore no guarantee that all your time and effort will benefit you into the future. So doesn't it make sense to spend most of your time and effort on something that you have control over and know will continue benefitting you in the future? We think so.