Search engine optimization is an ever-changing field. Big or small, significant or insignificant, this field is always bombarded with new revolutionary modifications and inventions.

Sometimes people in the SEO industry don’t even realize that whatever they have learned about off-page SEO could be outdated in 2015. To understand it better, let’s go some years back and analyze what was happening to SEO:

• People were following the conventional methods like article spinning, link exchange, excessive directory submission, and social bookmarking.
• Some people were even using black hat techniques like cloaking, link farm, and keyword stuffing. Ultimately they were making fools of Google search algorithms.

But here is what happened in the end, Google algorithms like Panda, Penguin, Pirate, Hummingbird & pigeon penalized or de-indexed thousands of websites that were using spammy off-page SEO. No matter big or small, these brands got penalized and lost both their website ranking and business visibility.

Old off-page SEO techniques can no longer add value to your website’s ranking, and may even bring a penalty to it. Thus, it is essential that you learn the new effective methods of doing off-page SEO.

“The new way to do off-page SEO is to earn relevant quality backlinks, curating quality content, maintaining the author rank & link profile followed by co-citation and co-occurrence.”

 

The two line answer may sound simple, but its implementation is not. There is an off-page SEO treasure hidden in the above sentences, all you need is to dig and find it. This won’t be easy but don’t worry, I will help you with that.

First, let’s break down above sentences into 5 parts to understand how to do better off-page SEO:

1. Earn Relevant Quality Backlinks

What is a quality backlink?

A quality backlink is a link which you earn from a relevant, high authority website that has greater trust value.

Now you know what a quality backlink is, but your next question would be how to get these quality backlinks! Here is a list of some good methods that will help you earn super quality links:

• Info-graphics
• Guest Blogging
• Social Media Outreach
• Broken Link Building
• Podcasts
• Blogger Outreach
• Supplier Links
• Product review
• Website Review
• App Reviews

2. Curate Relevant Quality Content

How many of you haven’t heard the phrase “Content is King”? I think there would be none who haven’t. Many digital marketers have been shouting out loud and explaining this phrase from years. It is vital to focus on generating fresh and quality content that is engaging, valuable and easy to read. If your content is interesting, people will naturally link to it and refer great traffic to your website.

3. Maintain the Author Rank

You may wonder how author rank can help you when Authorship is already dead. The secret is that although Google dropped all authorship functionalities in August 2014, it never discontinued author rank. Hence, you should still focus on maintaining your Author rank to help build a good reputation for yourself. When you build a good author rank everything that is connected with you becomes genuine. So the content you create considered authentic as well as worth to share.

Here are some points that can help you build a good author rank:

• Continue writing awesome content that shows your expertise.
• Create content that helps other solving their problems.
• Maintain your Google+ profile and add websites where you have published your contents

4. Maintain Your Link Profile

It is a fact that most of the algorithms penalties given by Google are for bad link profiles. This problem instantly affects your website’s authority and ranks. Therefore, maintaining a decent link profile is essential for successful SEO. The strategy to maintain an ideal link profile includes:

• The freshness of backlink: You may have been creating links for your website for years, but it doesn’t mean you should stop now. A 5-years old authority backlink may not have the same value as a 1-week old authority link. So earning fresh links are always needed.
• Relevancy of links: Links pointing to your site should preferably come from relevant sites that talk about the same topic as you.
• Authority of backlinks: When your website earns a high authority link, your site gets more value compared to a link to the less authority site. So, you must focus on getting a backlink from a website that has a high prestige in the market.
• Link neighbourhood: It is very crucial to check that, a website you get links from is not linked to spam sites. You have to make sure that your neighbours are reputed on the internet for their link profile.

5. Follow co-citation & co-occurrence

Co-citation and co-occurrence are the next immense formula to do modern day SEO. If you master both of these methods, you will start to see great SEO impact on your website. But first you need to understand what these two terms are:

• Co-citation: When a website or brand is mentioned by two different sources without an anchor text link.

• Co-occurrence: Co-occurrence is the frequency, presence and proximity of similar keywords across a variety of websites.

Google emphasizes more on the natural indirect relationship than the unnatural direct relationship between two websites. That is why Co-citation and Co-occurrence are proving to be the best techniques for doing off-page SEO.

How to do co-citation & co-occurrence

There are some good ways to earn co-occurrence and co-citation

• Curate killer contents that are mention-worthy by big authority brands.
• Ride on trending topics.
• Place contextual outbound links to authority websites.

So, did you find the hidden off-page SEO treasure in those two sentences? Great that you did, but finding it is not enough, you have to integrate this off-page SEO treasure into your search engine optimization strategy. And if you do, surely it will bring positive results to your SEO projects.

Lastly, with off-page SEO, I would also recommend keeping your on-page fully optimized to see the best results.