External SEO or off-page SEO generally refers to the set of activities that an SEO expert or webmaster performs outside the website (site management desk) to improve the performance and growth of the site.
Many employers and of course experts consider external SEO to be equivalent to external link building. It should be mentioned here; Although external link building, which we will discuss further, occupies a very important part of external SEO, but it is not equivalent to external SEO.
Basically, all the activities that managers and employees of a brand do outside of their website can be called external SEO. Because in this matter, the purpose of branding and the purpose of external SEO reach the same point, which is the growth of the website.
Next, we will deal with the external SEO checklist that every SEO expert should be familiar with:
Table of Contents
External linking
External linking is a significant part of off-page SEO activities. Although in specialized articles we will definitely discuss many different methods of external link building and we will share with you the methods of link discovery, but in the following I will discuss important points including how to analyze and discover links. Then I will describe the general methods of link building.
The first step in building external links is to thoroughly analyze your competitors. This analysis should include various dimensions such as external link building strategy analysis, review of sites where links are made, linked anchor texts, etc.
Note: Keep in mind that the link building strategy in external SEO cannot be imitated in any way. That means, by analyzing competitors, you should not directly conclude that my site should get links from the sites that competitors have taken links from.
Because many of the links that competitor analysis tools show us may have been disavowed by the webmaster or SEO expert of the competitor’s site. Now you will get those links for your site by imitating the link building strategy of your competitors. This method will not have any other points for us except getting lost.
Trick: use the ahrefs tool to analyze competitors’ sites and choose wisely. Check the source sites in terms of domain validity, page validity, and most importantly, thematic connection with your website, and if all these conditions are favorable, start linking on the similar site with your specific keyword.
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Where to link?
As it was said, for link building, you must analyze the competitors one by one in the first step and choose wisely and following some important points. Apart from that, if your business can make a name for itself in a specific field, it can easily get links from others.
In general, links may fall into several important categories, which I will briefly mention below:
Natural links
Natural links will be generated for your site without any action by the SEO expert. This issue occurs when your brand, your content, etc. are so prominent in a field that other sites and people link to it as a reference.
Note: Basically, we try to create natural links for ourselves in the external link building strategy.
Manual links
Manual links are created by the SEO expert and manually and sometimes with a fee for the website. These links can be placed in the following categories:
- Link building in online directories
- Link building in question and answer forums
- Profile links
- Guest post
Linking in this way should be completely natural so that Google does not notice any special signs of manual links. In the next articles, we will definitely talk about the methods of naturalizing external links. But in short, using no-follow links along with follow links and not optimizing anchor texts is one of the things that will help to naturalize your external links.
Social networks (social signal)
Although Google has stated in the past that the signal of social media such as the number of likes, interaction with followers, retweets, etc. is not one of the factors affecting the ranking and improvement of the site’s SEO, but according to the tests performed by prominent domestic and foreign webmasters, this It is almost certain that the signal of social media, especially Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, is effective in the SEO of your site.
Note: Since the social network is one of the most important ways of communication between the business and the audience, paying attention to suggestions, criticisms, etc. is significantly effective. This work is effective in your branding, your search, the increase of the interaction rate and finally your external SEO.
Important points in social media
- Social media pages are fully crawled and indexed and displayed as results in SERPs. As a result, share your content periodically on social networks.
- Sharing content on social networks significantly improves the user’s interaction with you and can receive links from other people as a reference.
- Give links to your social networks through your site, because unlike social networks, websites go through link juice.
Some important points in off-page SEO
As mentioned, external SEO includes all your activities outside the site. In general, one of the most important and valuable external SEO methods that are still used in the English SERP is the guest post.
Although guest blogging may cost money for the business, you should make sure that this cost is completely an investment. This can bring you real users apart from branding and differentiate your site from competitors.
In the continuation of foreign SEO strategies, I advise you not to ignore the following activities:
- Video sharing on social networks and video content producing sites; Be careful that video files have a strange potential for transmission in cyberspace and can quickly generate positive signals for you.
- Sharing images and infographics on video media such as Pinterest or Flickr is one of the very good and free ways to get external links and social media signals.
And the last word…
Site SEO, especially external SEO, is a time-consuming and reliable process for the growth of your site. Keep in mind that competitor analysis is one side of work and short and long-term strategy formulation for link building and off-site activities is another part. Be natural and behave naturally in external SEO, this sentence is perhaps the biggest and most important point that must be observed in off-page SEO.