You want to improve your organic search rankings but you don’t know where to start!

This off-page SEO checklist will help you optimize your website for better rankings on Google and other major search engines.

We’ve compiled the best off-page optimization strategies into one helpful guide that you can easily reference whenever you need it.

14-Step Off-Page SEO Checklist

1. Evaluate your backlink profile

The first step to improving organic search rankings on Google or other engines like Bing and Yahoo is through an evaluation of the links that are pointing toward your site from outside sources.

There is lots of information regarding link building out there, so I won’t spend much more time talking about it here.

It’s important to note that Google is getting smarter each day in identifying and penalizing website owners who attempt to manipulate their search rankings through artificial links, or even worse, black-hat SEO techniques (for example purchasing links) that could potentially bring down your search rankings.

So evaluating your backlink profile is vital to your efforts.

Before you start off-page SEO, first assess your backlink profile with one of these tools:

• Google Search Console
• Moz Link Explorer
• Ahrefs Backlink Checker
• Screaming Frog

Once you’re finished checking your backlinks, it’s time to move on to the next step in this off-page SEO checklist, which is checking your competitor’s backlink profiles.

2. Analyzing your competitors’ backlink profiles

Next, find the websites that are ranking for your most important keywords and run them through one of the backlink-checking tools mentioned above.

This way you’ll know what sorts of links they have pointed toward their site, whether they’re natural or artificial, and what anchor text is being used.

Keep an eye out for any patterns emerging in your competitor’s backlink profile, as this could be valuable information for your own Off-Page SEO strategy.

Also, see if they’re getting any links from pages containing words that are important to your site and do the same thing with those sites.

Simplifying the building process through an infographic

Try to get your linking partners to add appropriate text where you will be able to use it for link building.

Visit each one of your competitor’s sites and find their contacts (usually named contact or similar) on social networks, email, phone numbers, and addresses.

Send them a message asking them to add some little text about you on the website and describe why it is important for them to do so.

3. Create a powerful internal linking structure within your website

People always think of search engine optimization as a game, so here’s how you win: by linking to your homepage from all the other pages on your site.

This is what we call an “internal link,” and it’ll really give those robots at Google pause when they crawl through every inch of that website looking for strong content.

Make sure there are links in each section or subsection (or blog post) back to the main page; this will make everything easier if anyone tries using sitemaps with crawlers because then just follow where people have already been before them!

4. Crawl your own site

Crawling your own website is recommended so that you are aware of any broken links, 404 error pages, and missing titles or meta-descriptions.

Maybe the spiders have found some completely different data on the page than you expected (e.g., the page was loaded with errors), which would be beneficial information that you can use to fix it.

5. Consider loading your pages with keywords, but don’t overdo it!

Engaging in keyword-stuffing is one of the most frequent mistakes made by people who are just starting out in SEO.

There is no point stuffing the meta-titles, meta-descriptions, and the actual content of your blurbs with keywords.

You should make sure long-tail keywords are mentioned here and there in the context of the text, but you don’t need to overdo it because all that’s going to do is damage your site.

And yes, Google can tell when people are stuffing keywords in their content.

6. Utilize different types of images on your website and blog posts

Basically, there are two types of images that you should consider: informational and aesthetic images; this is what we’ll be talking about now.

Here’s a hint: try loading your article with images that explain the topic in a visually appealing way.

For example, if you’re writing a blog post about “The Color Green,” make sure there are images of green items scattered throughout the article (green leaves, green clothing).

It won’t be hard to find these types of pictures and they’ll help draw in readers who aren’t too keen on reading lots of text.

7. Assess your link-building options

With off-page SEO, time and experience are two of the most important factors.

With that in mind, one thing you might want to do is assess what type of links would best suit your needs based on these types:

Broken Links – If someone has their site linking back to yours but they changed or deleted it because something went wrong with either page’s design then this can be fixed by contacting them for a new hyperlink connection.

Guest Post Outreach – You may have had success marketing other companies before so now it’s time to leverage those skills for yourself.

Local Citations – While not as popular today (due to outraised effectiveness), these citations come from businesses near where you operate such as mapping and events directories.

Social Signals – Although these may not help you increase search engine rankings, they will improve your site’s traffic and user experience.

Negative SEO attacks – These are usually spammy links that you don’t want to have associated with your brand name;

Sponsored Links – Paid links can also help you boost your site’s search engine ranking. Just make sure you’re purchasing from a reliable full-service digital marketing company that isn’t going to destroy your website by loading it with spammy content.

8. Steal your competition’s links with broken link-building

Broken link building is one of the quickest ways to build your backlink profile.

You can find broken links on domains you want to earn a link from or check out competitors’ profiles for more ideas (Xenu, Ahrefs and Check My Links are some tools that help with this).

Find a page on your website that would work as an alternative replacement for any broken external links then send an email about it over!

It is a surefire way to get links anyway.

9. Share your knowledge and content

Sharing valuable, unique, and relevant LinkedIn articles has become a great way to create visibility.

Don’t be afraid to share your own stuff as well – you can gain valuable backlinks by sharing quality blog posts from around the web through LinkedIn Pulse.

Another great way to get influencers involved is with LinkedIn ad campaigns; publishing sponsored updates that link back to your website or directly pitching someone via InMail (a paid service) will help drive more awareness.

10. The power of peer-to-peer publicity

Another one for all you marketers out there! It might seem like an old trick, but word of mouth still works wonders when it comes to getting links and shares across social media.

Remember that old saying, “Birds of a feather flock together?” Well, this is just as true with links. If you have an influencer talking about your project on their blog, it may influence other influential bloggers to share content related to your campaign or even engage them in a back-and-forth conversation over email to get the ball rolling.

11. The power of humanizing your link

It’s not about always thinking about sales. Every successful online campaign (and offline campaign, for that matter) should be able to make the people involved feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves.

12. Planning your link-building outreach

Typically, the best time to send out a mass email for link building is on Monday morning.

However, if you are planning on pitching an influential blog post you’ve written about them or their website, it may be more beneficial to send that email later in the week, so they actually have time to digest and respond back.

13. Putting yourself into your emails

Did you know that people can tell when someone doesn’t actually write their own emails? I don’t mean just putting “Dear John Doe” as the salutation.

When crafting your outreach email, try always conjuring up some sort of memory or connection with each influencer before sending them an email.

This could include having met them at an event, having seen them speak at a conference, or even mentioning something you read in one of their online publications. The more personal you make the email, the better.

14. Putting “no response” emails on ice

I cannot stress enough how important it is to stay organized with your email outreach efforts. And by an organization, I mean sending reminders to influencers and knowing when it might be appropriate to send another follow-up email (and then actually doing it!).

If you haven’t received a response from someone after two weeks of following up via email and social media mentions without any luck, write down their name and keep track of their contact information. Then add these people to your CRM (customer relationship management) tool under the “icebox” category.

Six months to 1 year later, check your icebox list and see which emails might be worth another shot. Use the tools outlined in this blog post to re-connect with influencers to whom you originally sent an email (or social media mention) 6 to 12 months ago but never heard back from them.

You’d be surprised at how many people will respond when they get a reminder email after quite some time!

Final Words

The off-page SEO checklist is a simple list of things you can do to improve your organic search and get more visitors.

These are some tasks that might sound intimidating, but they don’t have to be if you partner with an expert who knows how all these principles work together.

Well, that’s it for now. I hope you enjoy the article and find value in reading it!

If you have any questions or thoughts on this topic, then let me know by typing them down below.

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The post 14 Powerful Off-Page SEO Checklist To Improve Your Organic Search appeared first on Tricky Enough.

Link Building is basically the process of creating links leading to your site. Organic link building is a very valuable part of any search engine optimization strategy.

This is due to Google’s prioritization of a site’s Authority. The Authority of a site is determined by the links leading to the site. The health of the links is an important factor too.

That’s because junk links are a breach of search engine rules. Also, quality links just  work better in your favor.

There are many SEO link building techniques around and when you combine them the impact of your efforts will visibly improve.

10 Golden Rules

1. Create Trendy Content

Creating unique and original content to generate links and traffic is still one of the organic link building strategies today. 

Craft content that gives people something valuable, something informative, something that they want.

You should start by researching popular search phrases for your website, product, or service and choose keywords with a low level of competition. 

Then, you can write unique articles using the keywords that you have chosen.

This also goes for guest blogging. You can hire an exceptional team to create guest blog articles that are high-quality and informative for people. Blogger outreach service companies, like Linkdoctor.io, can save time and resources so you can focus on other priorities.

2. Prioritize Link Relevance

Google likes to see the connection in links. Your website should have links from a site with a similar niche. 

This doesn’t mean that all links have to be similar. Sites are often mentioned in unrelated forums and blogs. For example, an internet newspaper forum may have people discussing politics.

The bottom line here is, be present where you are relevant. It might take some research, but you’ll want to be visible where it counts.

3. Understand Content Marketing

This may be one of the oldest methods used by marketing agents. However, it’s still useful. As long as you create similar and useful content for the site’s readers, then you’re on the right path.

• Some basic things you can do with content writing are:
  • Submitting to article directories
  • Submitting to Blogs
  • Submitting to a credible site

Your articles should show up in the search results for the low competition keywords that you have chosen. Having great content can result in generating traffic for your website.

4. Pursue Natural Linking Intent

Google has a complicated algorithm to determine if the linking intent is commercial or natural. The system is not perfect and Google can make mistakes. 

To avoid all penalties, you should always apply this simple rule: an organic link to showcase your site in front of your audience. 

• Here are a few things to avoid:
  • Irrelevant links just for “link juice”
  • Having your links in irrelevant articles
  • Obsolete links
  • Dead links

You should look for these links and remove them right away. Toxic links will be bad for you, so this is worth spending some time on.

Creating organic links is something Google likes to see. It would also be a good practice to get backlinks not only from sites with the .com extension, but particularly from websites with.org, .net, .gov, and .edu extensions.

In a few cases, websites will include links to their articles for the sake of SEO. But with today’s algorithm, this won’t be as effective as before. This could even get websites penalized.

5. Comment on Blogs

This technique has been abused in the past. Regardless, it is still very effective when used in combination with other organic link building methods. The trick is to make sure that what you have to say means something.

Search for blogs that are similar to your website, product, or service and make sure that they allow you to enter your name and URL when posting a comment.

Read the blog and post a comment that is useful and informative. Webmasters will delete comments that they view as spam and it is important that you add value with your comment and not try to sell yourself. 

Post comments on both do-follow and no-follow blogs to make sure that the search engines view the links as “natural”.

However, please avoid spamming this resource. Spam comments often lead to penalties and a bad reputation for your site.

6. Use Deep Linking

Use your backlink building technique all through your website, not merely to a single page.

A natural hyperlink design should appear in several locations of a website. It’s simple to persuade people to try a new experience with deep linking, such as installing an app. 

Nevertheless, there isn’t any typical deep link ratio. The majority of websites conduct themselves differently. For instance, weblogs generally have much more as compared to others.

7. Optimize the Site for Your Readers

Google has a lot of ways to gather insights on pages. For example, they can run a reverse engineering algorithm to determine which site sells links. 

They will analyze the age of the domain, who it belongs to, and if it was transferred. 

To make sure a search engine understands what your content is about, you’ll need to include the keyword a few times in the article. 

Google can determine if your site is commercial or informational. They will also analyze how users behave on your site. For example, if users hit the back button right after landing on your site, this is not a good sign. 

With this data, Google can determine how people “experience” your site. This is why you should give importance to User Experience. 

• Some things to watch out for when it comes to user experience are:
  • Long loading times
  • Bland, text-filled pages
  • Thin pages
  • Difficult site navigation

Allowing site visitors to enjoy your site implies they spend more time in it. This reflects positively with Google and how they will rank your page.

8. Observe Consistency

Don’t let Google question your website authority. It won’t matter if your web-site gets 1000 links the first 5 days. What counts is how this develops over time.

Consistency is the key. If you’re organic link building 15 links per day, try to stick to that number. 

If the links stop all of a sudden, Google will start asking questions. “What happened to the site?  Why is no one linking to it anymore? Has it become irrelevant?”

Don’t get in the position where Google has to question your authority. It’s only natural, if you just made the headlines, you will get thousands of links in a short period from web-sites like CNN and BBC.

9. Operate, Don’t Stroll Through SEO Spam-Havens

Link directories and farms are considered irrelevant nowadays. They will only get you penalized. Hyperlink farming and link directories are mainly referred to as useless in regards to link building. 

Don’t look for credit within spam-havens or even link-exchange systems. 

Whenever you’re prepared to incorporate backlink building to your Organic Search effort, you have to talk to SEO experts who understand backlink building guidelines.

10. Develop Backlinks with Superior, Moderate as well as Low PR websites

Keep in mind, to always modify the anchor text. The same idea has to with backlink building over a selection of PR websites. 

Authority hyperlinks are wonderful, but a selection of high and low PR websites may be the approach to take. Guest blogging is an effective way to reach new readers. 

By publishing articles on other well-known websites, you’ll get your content in front of new readers and get more exposure.

Conclusion

If you don’t develop a link building strategy you’ll be wasting your time, and money if you pay for links. It is a risk to do so because generating backlinks based on quantity over quality can result in a serious penalty.

The purpose of a link building strategy is to plan to build high-quality links that target incoming traffic. In other words, having incoming links creates visibility for a site.

It also adds credibility because each quality, targeted backlink counts as a vote for a site as far as SEO is concerned. Also, each link placed among relevant content to a product or service increases the chances of making a sale.

Hopefully, you will be able to apply these simple techniques to your link building strategy. Don’t try to play the system and you will see rewards.

The post 10 Golden Rules for Organic Link Building appeared first on Tricky Enough.

Usually, we all have pages optimized for long tails. They are easier to push through high competition and have more discernable intent behind them, which makes them ideal for SEO. And in almost all cases we lose a great share of traffic that these pages could bring. Being on Google’s second page is like being one step closer to success and not making this step, but still not succeeding Preposterous. But today I will tell you that how you can rank on Google’s first page and get more organic traffic to your website or blog.

Part 1. Identifying Pages That Rank on Google’s Second Page

You can fiddle with Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) and then check each keyword manually with Google Keyword Planner (KWP), but that’s cumbersome, and you will waste your time as well as energy. So, I am here with a simple tool with which you can save your time and energy and rank your keywords on Google’s first page with ease.

So, simply run your domain through Serpstat.com (since this tool doesn’t require you to be the site’s owner, I’ll run nike.com as an example) and click on “Tree View”:

With Google Webmaster Tools, you’d have to sort your list of keywords by “Avg. Position” and scroll down until you see the 11th position and lower. Then you’d have to run the ones you selected with Google Keyword Planner to estimate their volumes. And then you’d still have to identify which of your pages are currently ranking for these keywords. According to my opinion, Google never gives the exact results in Google webmaster tools and Google keyword planner that’s why we have to depend on other tools which provide us accurate results and help us to rank on Google’s First Page.

I’m tired of just listing these steps, never mind performing them.

Luckily, now you can see your pages along with your keywords (their position dynamic, Volume, CPC, and level of competition) all in one place:

Now, click on “Filters”:

Set the values 11 to 20 in the “Domain position for a keyword” field (you can go deeper with the 30th and even the 40th positions, but let’s focus on Google’s second page first), hit Enter and you’ll have your list of keywords and pages:

Some of our pages (or Nike’s in this case) contain long-tail keywords in the 11th to 20th position bracket. You can see that this page ranks in the 11th position for at least one long tail – “12 weeks half marathon training schedule” – which makes it ideal for further optimization. It would take a few weeks to get this page on top of this query. We’ll gain considerably more traffic as a result.

Part 2. Optimization and Tracking

Now that we’ve located our potential top pages and keywords let’s move on to optimization. Lucky you, I won’t mention meta tags and keyword density – not once. Instead, we’re going to focus on just one on-page practice – internal linking – and mention a few others.   

But before we proceed, I encourage you to start tracking your newly targeted keywords. There’s nothing innovative about this action, but tracking will give you a wider view of competing pages and will let you quickly identify good content out there. Consider this an integral part of your optimization process.

When it comes to position tracking, there’s no such thing as an overly in-depth analysis. Unfortunately, not that many tools track keywords as deep as the top 100, while others offer only domain tracking, like SEMrush and Ahrefs, for example. Anyhow, the choice of tool is up to you.

Here’s my project which lets me track individual keywords as far as the top 100, but it’s strictly confidential, so you never saw it, right?

Now that you monitor your keywords’ positions, you’re all set. Our next step is to use our selected long tails as anchors and set up interlinking. We’re spreading link juice and showing Google that this page is more important. And Google will oblige!

Amazon might get away with a gazillion anchors per product page:

But you won’t. It’s widely disputed, but the optimal number of interlinks per page is somewhere between 3 and 4. Using our keywords on position 11 in our anchor text, title tags, and H1 is a great way to boost our SEO.

Check:

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As you may remember, some of our pages contain more than one potentially top-ranking keyword. 

In this case, we could use “Jordan retro release date” as an anchor text to link to our respective product page.

Now we have our list of pages and keywords (note that this identification stage only took us few minutes) and should move on to further optimizing these pages for these keywords.

Now, all we have to do is watch them crawl upward and remember to keep an eye on their positions.

Finally What I want To say:

This is one of the best ways to get a better organic search for your website or blog. And if you have questions or queries, please feel free to ask.

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The post The Easiest Way to Get More Traffic from Organic Search appeared first on Tricky Enough.