10 basic off-site SEO tips to generate traffic
To follow on from our last post 10 basic on-site SEO tips to get you started, as promised we have put together some off-site SEO tips to take you that step further in generating more traffic to your website. Here are Connect UK Media’s DIY top 10 tips for off-site SEO…
1) Get social
Social Networking is bigger than ever these days! Getting yourself on social media sites is the fundamental step to help you advertise, market and build your online reputation within your niche.
Sign up to the most popular social networking sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+. Create a profile for your business and start extending your online network of contacts. You can then promote your business and start gaining important links back to your website. If your content is interesting enough you’ll get some shares and likes which Google loves to see!
2) Start blogging
Blogging is one of the best ways to promote your website online! By writing a blog for your website, you give a reason for visitors to keep returning to your website and keep up to date with your latest posts. It also helps search engines to crawl your site more frequently, as they have to update your latest blog post entries, which ultimately helps you rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Try to include your keywords in blog posts and link back to other pages in your website. Be careful though – don’t stuff your posts with keywords as this could be seen as a ‘spammy’ approach by Google. Be subtle and be clever! If you follow this method throughout your blog posts you will start to see the effect it has on your Google rankings.
3) Start posting on forums
Find forums online that are related to your website’s niche and get involved within that community. Reply to threads, answer peoples questions and offer advice. This all helps to build up your reputation as someone who is an expert within that niche. When Google see’s that you are giving some worthwhile advice on a forum you will be rewarded. This may sound a bit involved but it really isn’t – it will take a few minutes to implement.
4) Submit your website to search engines
Search engines will eventually find your website, but that can take a while. To speed everything up, you should submit your website to the most popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Just create an account and upload your sitemap to each of these search engines. For Google, just add your website to ‘Google Search Console’ and follow the instructions for submitting a sitemap. You can also view some great website stats in here.
5) Sign up to free business listings
Get your business out there and sign up to some free business listing accounts. Fill out as much information as you can and don’t be afraid of putting your address everywhere – it’s going to help you get found on search engines for local area searches. Follow this link and start signing up to the websites listed here. Sign up to as many as you can!
6) Directory submissions
Find directories online that relate to your niche. Google likes to see your website associated on niche specific directories. Most of these websites will have an option where you can select what category your website falls under – make sure it’s relevant to your business! You can submit to general directories, but for maximum impact you are better off submitting to niche directories.
7) Get business reviews
Ask all your friends and customers to write a review on your business. Once your Google+ account is set up you can start collecting reviews. The more positive reviews you have, the more likely Google is to reward you. A good incentive for B2B reviews is to offer them one in return!
8) Link building
Some of the methods above fall under the link building umbrella, but we’ve included this as it’s own entity because it really is that important. It is also something you need to be very careful with. Avoid all automatic link building processes and websites that say they will submit your website to 2500+ directories. The likelihood is that these links won’t work and they will be for websites with a poor reputation that are unrelated to your business. They will only do you harm!
Unfortunately it’s a long process but it’s better to build less good links than more bad ones – if that makes sense! You can use tools which show you the reputation of other websites and if they are worth linking to. You can also see what your competitors are doing. Moz’s Open Site Explorer is a great, free tool to help with this.
9) Article submission
If you write your articles yourself, then you can submit them to popular article directory sites like; Ezine, Go Articles, Now Public, etc. This can help drive traffic to your website, whilst you can also gain some links to your site from other people (though it’s usually a slower process).
10) Use the power of video
If you have any videos that you have used on your website, then you can submit them to websites like; YouTube and Vimeo. Videos are a very powerful source and generally get more of a reaction from people – if you can submit great video content you have better chances of getting those all important likes and shares that help your online reputation!
Well, that’s about it for our off-site SEO tips…we hope they are useful to you! If you have any questions about any of these methods or would like some more advice please feel free to get in touch!
