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In the field of search engine marketing, there is SEO and then there is off-page SEO. Once you developed and refined your local SEO content assets, the next step is expanding your SEO strategy to other channels that will link to it, and this is called off-page SEO. In this guide, first I will show you how to prepare your off-page SEO strategy in order to stay organized, and after that, I will list 24 common off-page SEO tactics that you can use.

Table of Contents

  1. Before you Begin your Off-Page SEO Strategy
    1. Content Assets Worksheet
    2. Outreaches and Follow Up Worksheet for Off-page SEO
    3. Off-Page SEO Register
    4. Other Off-Page SEO Strategy Documents
  2. List of Off-Page SEO Tactics
    1. Ask for Backlinks
    2. Request backlinks in 3rd Party Pages with Broken Outlinks
    3. Check for Broken Earned Backlinks 
    4. Publish Press Releases Each Time it is Appropriate
    5. Create a Mini-website on Google My Business and boost your Off-Page SEO
    6. Develop Social Bookmarking Tactics
    7. Invest Money in Publicity, Marketing and/or Advertising
    8. Become a Speaker for Events
    9. Email Efforts (cold pitching, query letters, etc)
    10. Participate in Podcasts as One-off Participant
    11. Participate on Websites and Blogs by Commenting
    12. Make Powerful Articles in your Main Site or Blog
      1. Write for The Human Reader
    13. Influencer Marketing, and Influencer Outbound for Off-Page SEO
      1. Paying Influencers for Traffic
      2. Out-linking to Influencers
    14. Invest in Expired Domains that Contain your Keywords
      1. Option 1: Redirect them to your site.
      2. Option 2: Develop a mini-website
      3. Option 3: Develop a niche website
    15. Guest Post Submissions: Classic Off-Page SEO
    16. Add Owned Videos to Video Portals
    17. Attempt to Get Do-Follow Connections
    18. Purchase Backlinks
    19. Enter your Website in Site Directories
    20. Upload Owned Photos and Images to Sites like Flickr
    21. Spread Owned Readable Documents through Sites like Scribd
    22. Contribute Disinterested Content to Web Forums
    23. More Off-Page SEO by Contributing Dedicated Articles to Article Sites
      1. Ways to spin an article
    24. Uncommon Off-Page SEO Process: Constantly Help Others in Q-A Sites
    25. Offer Your Content Pages as Assets for 3rd Party Pages
  3. Outro: Any Off-Page SEO Tactics You Would Like To Share?

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Before you Begin your Off-Page SEO Strategy

Off-page SEO is an SEM (search engine marketing) strategy that increases a page’s (or an entire website’s) authority with the search engines. In priority, it must be done after actually tweaking your page or site for SEO. 

The way to do this is to have a carefully maintained list of content assets in which all the top tier pieces (the pages in your website that are the last stop for your audience, that you’ll be linking to), and at the same time carrying a record of all the off-page SEO assets that you will use to that end, but not on the same worksheet. 

This strategy has dozens of moving parts and if you don’t develop a method to organize it, it soon becomes a hell to maintain. 

Before getting to the nitty-gritty of the off-page SEO tactics, I will show you the scheme I use to manage the off-page SEO strategy as a whole.

Content Assets Worksheet

content assets worksheetA simplified version of the Content Assets Worksheet

As I said, a content assets worksheet is essential, and not just to use in an off-page SEO strategy. In this worksheet, you will carry a list of all the pages and sites you want to appear in the first pages of search engine results (SERP). These are called in many different ways.

    Money Pages
    Affiliate Pages
    Sales Pages
    Pillar Content
    Squeeze Pages
    Main Pages
    Product Pages

These pages are generally the last pages you want your readers to reach, and pretty much the objectives of your off-page SEO tactics.

It means that in these pages you will have several CTAs (call-to-action) elements that, after convincing the reader, will allow them to perform the MWA (most wanted action) for that page. 

An MWA is whatever your CTA will help your user accomplish. 

Examples of MWAs:

    Requesting an Estimate
    Buying a Product
    Hiring a Service
    Subscribing

Columns that you should include in the Content Assets worksheet:

    Title: the page’s headline
    Keyword: the focus keyword of the item
    Category: the section of the website in which the item is published
    SEO Score: the SEO score of the page (measured with an SEO plugin)
    Type: is it a page? A post? A video?
    When: date of publication
    Where: in which of your owned channels is the item published

Outreaches and Follow Up Worksheet for Off-page SEO

outreach and follow up worksheetA simplified version of the Outreaches and Follow Up Worksheet

In this document, you will enter every channel and person you will contact to ask for guest posts and similar actions.

Examples of columns for the Outreach and Follow-Up Worksheet:

    Channel Url: the site or page where you want your guest content to be featured
    SEO Rank: in this column, you should write the SEO rank of the channel (you can use Alexa or similar tools to check it)
    Email: email of the person in charge that would greenlight your item
    Date Pitched: the date you contacted the person in charge with a pitch
    Follow Up 1: (date) no reply? Then you follow up one week later, date
    Follow Up 2: (date) no reply again? Then you follow up again
    Follow Up 3: (date) if they didn’t reply a third time, you might stop for a month or try again later (maybe they are busy)

Off-Page SEO Register

Finally, the main worksheet and the one that will integrate your off-page SEO efforts. In this worksheet, you must register all the off-page SEO tactics that you want to pursue. 

Why can’t you bundle this worksheet with any of the two previous ones, you may ask? 

That’s because the real purpose of this worksheet is to have a bird-eye view of your efforts. You need this bird-eye view of your off-page SEO efforts to be able to balance them. 

After some time, this worksheet may become superfluous, but in the beginning, you will also need it to discover which processes of your off-page SEO strategy work and which ones don't.

 

Examples of columns for the Off-Page SEO Register

    Process: here you will note the type of tactics you will pursue
    Type: is it paid? Is it free?
    Potential Partners: in a single line, list all the channels you want to use
    Earned Channels: in a single line, list all third-party channels in which you achieved a backlink
    Owned Channels: in a single line, list all owned channels in which you have backlinks for the process
    Instances: how many times you worked for the tactic, count one for each backlink, not channel

Other Off-Page SEO Strategy Documents

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I think the three I just named are the most important for your off-page SEO strategy, but you can always create more documents to organize yourself more. Examples:

Off-Page SEO Diary: to write a log about how you are evolving your strategy, use it to write all observations that you want to remember, other info you can include in the diary are ToDos, schedules, and similar data

Off-Page SEO Tree: to create a diagram that will map the tactics that you will use, in order. You can order the tree by SEO rank of the owned and earned channels that you want to use, by cost, by priority, by time to completion, or any other order that’s useful to you

Results Worksheet: before and after implementing each tactic you must analyze how the process has impacted your SEO rank and other metrics. If you don’t carry a results worksheet, it gets messy to find out what works and what doesn’t

 

List of Off-Page SEO Tactics

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Here is a list (by no means exhaustive) of 24 different off-page SEO tactics that you can use. Keep in mind that you can always figure out other tactics not included here. If you do, you should test and analyze their results also. Notice in the pie chart above how off-page SEO tactics take a 20.26% percent of the factors that will determine where your sites and pages will appear in Google's SERPs (search engine results pages).

Ask for Backlinks

If during your social monitoring deeds you find a mention of your name, your product, or your service on a web page, contact the administrator.

Kindly ask the person in charge to add a link from the mention that pertains to you, your websites, your products, or services to one of your sites or pages that relates in topic to the page with the mention.

Request backlinks in 3rd Party Pages with Broken Outlinks

While social monitoring, you may find pages that are optimized for any of your keywords. Check those pages carefully, and zero in any outbound links. Test the outbound links that you find.

Probably the best way to do this is checking the pages or sites you want to check for broken outbound links with a crawler, like Screaming Frog.

If you spot any link that’s broken, contact the person in charge. Ask them to fix the broken outbound links, by linking to your related pages.

Check for Broken Earned Backlinks 

This procedure is pretty much like the one in the previous section.

Instead of checking for third-party broken outbound links, you will check and make sure that the links in third-party sites linking to your sites and pages work.

Publish Press Releases Each Time it is Appropriate

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Press releases are a great way to get news releases out there to let everybody know that you released something. It can be a new business, product, service, site, or even a major new feature in one of your websites.

Press releases invite those who read it (generally, but not just), like for example journalists, to take a look at the item you just launched.

They are also great as a back-linking tactic since many websites where you can upload press releases don’t delete them and they will stay there perpetually.

You may get authority from press releases even years after they were current. Because of that, you should also consider your press releases when you are checking for broken backlinks.

Create a Mini-website on Google My Business and boost your Off-Page SEO

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Google sites aren’t great by any means. In my experience as a free user of the service, I also think they are not very flexible. But that’s from my point of view because I’m not a subscriber to Google Suite.

Maybe they become more flexible and you can add more features to them once you sub to G Suite, I don’t know. Maybe if you know how to code you could squeeze a free Google Site for more functionality.

Still, without subscribing and without knowing how to code, you can build a very basic website where you can post a link to another resource on the web for which you want to increase authority.

Develop Social Bookmarking Tactics

Social bookmarking tactics are very easy to figure out. Still, they must be considered as a part of a bigger off-page SEO strategy.

It’s believed that the authority you gain from this kind of website is marginal. It’s also believed that linking yourself to pages on your main business sites from these sites is counter-productive.

You shouldn’t stress if someone else adds pages of your websites to their social bookmarking accounts.

But when it comes to your use of them, as a piece in the machinery of authority farming, you should be a little more careful.

The best use for these sites that I found, so far, in the task of authority farming, is to add all of them at the bottom of a PBN (personal backlink network).

In that way, you aren’t linking directly to your pages of valuable content from social bookmarking sites.

You are linking to a little bit better website in which you have an account or profile, which in turn links upwards two more times before finally reaching your value content at the top of the pyramid.

Invest Money in Publicity, Marketing and/or Advertising

If you haven’t already invested in ads, public relations, or marketing to promote your websites, products, or services, don’t break the piggy bank yet.

It will be better if you approach your paid promotions strategy carefully, since you may waste your money if you don’t know what you are doing.

An example of ads would be web ads purchased from an ads broker like Google or Facebook.

An example of marketing would be paying an influencer to review your products.

An example of public relations would be paying a journalist to write about one of your services.

Each of these tactics should be studied before actually committing money to any of them. You need to learn about all of them to know a few things.

    Which one is the most appropriate for your products or services
    How each one works, what are their costs-benefits ratios
    How you can plan an extended tactical schedule (weeks, months)
    In which way you can scale any of the tactics up
    How you will fit the tactics into your greater business strategy
    Maybe something else about them that I’m forgetting right now

Once you know everything there is to know about the promotion methods that you want to pursue, then yes, go ahead and draft your tactics, and begin purchasing promotion services.

Become a Speaker for Events

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It’s important to consider that speaking for regular or virtual events carries a great potential of increasing your authority. The value of being an events speaker is the word of mouth factor.

Word of mouth is a very effective promotional tactic.

What’s important about it is that for the people attending the event, to see you deliver a speech to them, generates in them more trust, since you aren’t hiding behind written words on a page, or behind the imagery of web videos.

Email Efforts (cold pitching, query letters, etc)

It may be argued that email marketing isn’t as effective as it once was, and we must thank spammers for that.

In whichever way you use email to conduct business, it can be used to augment your authority farming efforts.

The way to do it is by editing your email signature and adding links to websites, social profiles, and/or specific pages to it.

This use of backlinks is unlike most of the methods on this list of off-page SEO,

Participate in Podcasts as One-off Participant

In a perfect world in which you already amassed a considerable chunk of authority, you wouldn’t pursue this avenue of self-promotion. Those publishing podcasts would contact you and invite you without you having to do anything.

Yet, when you are starting, things are different. If you care about being featured in a podcast you must approach this tactic proactively.

One way you can parlay your contribution to a podcast is simply searching the web for sites that are looking for contributions to podcasts, by a boolean Google search like: podcasts participants OR contributors OR speakers +wanted.

Another way would be to identify a specific podcast that you think will help you in your authority gathering endeavors and then outreach to the owner, asking about the possibility of making a guest appearance in it.

Participate on Websites and Blogs by Commenting

It has been proven that commenting on blogs will increase your website visits.

If you comment in the comments section of web pages or blogs with interesting, amusing, valuable, or helpful content, many of the persons who read your comments or replies will want to know more about you and what you have to offer.

You must have accounts in each of the major comment systems, like for instance Disqus. Each time you read something on the web and think you can contribute value, you should comment.

Generally, comment systems allow you to add your name, your email, and an URL that links to a page or site of your choice. Take advantage of this, and each time you comment you are also creating a backlink to your owned resources.

Somewhere I did read that a good practice for your profiles in comment systems is to use your company’s or your product’s logo as the avatar, instead of a picture of your face.

That’s because in the case that the administrator decides, for any reason, to remove the link to your owned pages, then your comments will stay generating awareness of your brand, albeit in a more passive way.

Make Powerful Articles in your Main Site or Blog

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By powerful read quality content. What exactly is quality content? As I see it is content that strikes a balance between being useful for the reader as well as technically well-made for the search engines.

Your content needs to further the already existing store of knowledge available in the topic it covers. Meaning that before writing it you must research the subject appropriately.

Before actually researching the sub-topics you are going to include in your article you must do market research.

Market research for article writing is about searching for your keywords in three or more search engines. You must get acquainted with almost every article that resembles the one you want to write in the first search results pages of each search engine you use.

Once you have an idea of what is already available to read on the first page of each search engine, you must calibrate the topic to the parts of it that haven’t been explored in depth.

By doing this you’re going to have more chances of your article reaching the first pages of the SERPs. You can’t cover the same aspects of a topic that other articles already covered, even if you think you can give the article angles that others haven’t exhausted.

Of course, that untapped angles of a topic always help, but you need to do more than that to compete with the best articles about your keywords that are already available.

After you do this content market research, you will have an idea of what not to write about, and which sub-topics of the topic aren’t treated in depth. Now comes the hardest part.

First, you need to make a list of the sub-topics that aren’t satisfactorily exploited by all the best articles you found. With that list in hand, you can do the content research properly. If you have extensive knowledge about the topic, and you notice that some sub-topic wasn’t touched by any of the articles, add it to the list as well.

The best sources for research are other people (that you can interview), other media (other than the one you intend to use), and books. While you do this content research, write down everything you find that expands the topics that aren’t sufficiently covered by the best articles.

While you’re doing this you must be all the time looking for hidden pieces of knowledge that will add to your article that unique angle that will make the piece valuable.

Also, if you know the subject extensively, and you added a sub-topic that nobody cared to touch, that aspect of the subject can be the unique angle of the piece.

Write for The Human Reader

In the next table, I will show you the two main types of elements that your article must include, to be balanced between being valuable for readers and technically sound to be favored by search engine spiders.

Reader-Oriented Qualities

Search Engine Technicalities

    Evergreen (always up to date)
    Actionable (helps readers to act or at least react to the content)
    Unique (attracts the readers with exclusivity)
    Rich (it is entertaining to read)
    The topic must have a useful angle not seen anywhere else
    Must have CTAs (calls to action)
    Must have a great headline
    Must have different types of media, like photos, images, video, infographics
    The page and media elements must have correctly written SEO Metadata
    Must not bore the reader
    Must be substantial
    Each page must link (to related content in the same site, or even to itself) and out-link (to content on other sites) to other great articles on the topic
    Must have at least one section with hard data items and citations to back them
    Must introduce new sections each 700 or so words
    Must have a minimum of 1500 words, the longer the better
    Must be focused on a single keyword per page
    You must bold, underline, or italicize the keyword of each page at least once
    You must use the keywords of each page in some subheadings
    Include means for the readers to interact with the content
    It is better if your site has a comments system feature in place
    lt will benefit from social features (like, share, save) on every page

Every article on your website must have auto-generated social media integrations (also known as social media meta tags) in place:

    OpenGraph (Facebook)
    Rich Media Snippets (Google)
    Twitter Cards (Twitter)

Your content must follow compliance good practices:

    Mobile Version
    Accessibility Features
    Cookies Configuration
    Legal pages (Privacy Policy, Terms of Service) 
    Each page should have a matching AMP version for visitors on mobile (either hand-crafted or automatic)
    Each page must be optimized for fast loading times and have a green score in Google PageSpeed Insights

Influencer Marketing, and Influencer Outbound for Off-Page SEO

Paying Influencers for Traffic

If you have money to invest in your authority farming strategy, a good tactic to employ is to get an influencer to talk about, or review, your product or service.

You have to choose an influencer that has a large following in your niches. The best-case scenario would be to find an influencer that is working on the same keywords you are using.

When dealing with influencers for traffic, you have to do your homework. They don’t come cheap and you might be scammed.

Be sure to look beyond vanity metrics and, even if the influencer in question provides you with a metrics report, research her or his reach and traffic by yourself before opening your wallet.

Out-linking to Influencers

This is more of an on-page SEO tactic. When you are creating content that an influencer with big following covers, use the opportunity of needing to link outwards from your article to link to them.

Search engines will consider the link. It will be better than an outbound link to a random generic page, even if it covers the keyword of the article in an exhaustive or useful way.

Invest in Expired Domains that Contain your Keywords

Expired domains that contain one of your keywords are valuable for many reasons.

Many users of the former websites will land on your pages when directly entering the domain name in their browsers.

They may have it in their bookmarks and land on your site when they decide to revisit.

More importantly, you will benefit from a great percentage of the authority the previous website gathered through the years it was online.

 

Expired domain names can be exploited in several different ways:

Option 1: Redirect them to your site.

You can redirect them to the homepage of your website, or to a big master/money page optimized for the keyword that the name contains.

Option 2: Develop a mini-website

You can develop a mini-website featuring some original content. Then you can create do-follow links from different keyword instances to different pages and articles on your website.

This is certainly more flexible and valuable than simply redirecting the domain to a single page as outlined in option 1.

Option 3: Develop a niche website

You can develop a complete niche website, but in that case, you must carefully weigh your objectives. If you want to completely unbundle a keyword from your main site and dedicate a whole new site to it, go ahead.

Otherwise, building another niche website for a keyword that fits, or that is closely related to the ones in the website you already have is unwise. You are creating a new site that will compete with the one you already own.

Guest Post Submissions: Classic Off-Page SEO

This is a classical way of increasing your authority in your niches by means of off-page SEO tactics. My recommendation is to be acquainted inside out with any blog or website you choose for submitting guest posts.

Know all of its sections and home in those where you think that your article will fit. Know the owner and engage her or him in other channels, like for instance in social media.

Before even starting to work on the actions of the previous two paragraphs be sure that the site is worthy of the effort you need to make to build relationships.

To do that you should make a list of the websites where you think it will be beneficial to you to submit guest posts. You can also take advantage of a list of sites that accept guest posts that someone else already made.

Other ways of making your list of potential guest post candidates are using search engines with a boolean search like: [keyword] + “guest post”. Or you can use a competitor analysis web tool.

Once you have the list, be sure of giving each site a pass of tools like Buzzsumo (paid) or Alexa (free). This will give you an idea of the monthly visits and other traffic metrics.

Add the metrics that you think are going to help your guest post to the list, and then curate the best sites to a shortlist.

Add Owned Videos to Video Portals

Even if producing videos takes time, effort, and sometimes money, it is a great way of gaining impulse and generating a critical mass of followers.

We all know that valuable things are hard to achieve and take above-average exertion. Producing videos consistently is one of the best examples of this fact.

The secret to succeeding as a video publisher is consistency. Design a video posting schedule and stick with it, come what it might.

For example, if you commit yourself to post two or three videos a week, decide on which days of the week you will do it, and simply do it. If you can, post them on the days you originally decided and never skip one day.

As with keyword tools, video websites have dedicated analytic tools, and you should do market research about the potential keywords before starting to plan your video production strategy.

Attempt to Get Do-Follow Connections

This applies to all the off-page SEO tactics in which you will seed your outbound links that will link to your pages and websites.

Always remember that for a link to your content in a third-party channel, what counts is for the link to be do-follow.

Purchase Backlinks

This is probably the only blackhat tactic recommended in this list. Google, for example, is against this practice. Be careful, you don’t want to step in any toes. Getting banned from the big G will set back enormously all the work you did for your sites.

You should do a background check of the agency from which you want to buy backlinks. Even asking in a community forum like Reddit won’t hurt.

Stay away from companies that build links by buying them from web admins, forums, personal backlink networks, or link farm brokers.

Enter your Website in Site Directories

Waters are kind of divided when the topic is using directory submissions as a method for backlinks, SEO, or other value-adding tactics.

There are many pitfalls you have to evade when you decide to pursue a directory submission strategy.

The first piece of advice I will give you is this, check the sources from where you get links to directories where you can submit your site. Otherwise, you’re bound to lose precious time with submissions that are not going to go through.

The second recommendation I have for you is this: use a spreadsheet from day one of implementing this tactic.

First, you will use the topmost cells of the worksheet to curate links to the websites that offer lists of directories to submit sites. Don’t go overboard with your list of pages with lists.

Many of those pages contain a large number of entries. Don’t overdo it, and don’t curate more than a dozen or so of those pages.

After you did that, in the same document, say, five to ten cells below the last entry, you can begin curating the directory sites themselves. 

You can title each column, to be more organized. Four columns are necessary, you might one to add an extra one. Each of those columns should be:

    URL: Here you will enter the URL of the directory
    Standalone Articles?: Here you will record if the directory takes also pages, not just homepages
    Account Required?: Here you will record if you can or can’t enter a site or page without registering
    Done: Here you will enter an X or a ‘yes’ if you already submitted your site or page to the directory.

The conveniences of carrying such a worksheet are many. It helps you to remind yourself where you left off.

It will be useful to create new lists, I’ll tell why below. It helps you to never lose time submitting to a site you already submitted or trying to submit to one that is broken.

Initially, you will copy the lists from the web pages that offer them in this document, and keep them there for later use. Each time you submit to a directory, you will put an X in the Done column.

You will find that some of the lists that you found, even if they advertise themselves as being current for the current year (or even month), that many of the websites they list aren’t online anymore.

Also, sometimes it will frustrate you to find out that after you filled the submission when you press the send button, something happens that you can’t complete the process.

A few more considerations for off-page SEO through web directories:

One, have your submission’s copy ready, on a plain text file. After a few submissions, you will get an idea of what word counts / character counts are appropriate, and what data besides the submission’s copy itself you need to include with your submission (like email).

Have those snippets of microcopy ready in the same plain text file you have your submission’s main copy.

Two, before even starting the submission tasks, create a page on your website named “reciprocals”. You will need that page later on because many of the sites you will submit to will ask you for a ‘reciprocal URL’.

A reciprocal URL is a URL of the reciprocal page you created, in which you will have to add links to the directory that kindly accepted your submission.

Remember to add the reciprocal URL on your page, right then and there, when you are creating the submission.

Otherwise, you may forget about it. If the administrators of the directories find your submission and notice that you didn’t add them to the reciprocal page, they might delete your submission.

Some directories even check for the reciprocal link automatically, when you press the submit button, so add the links before submitting.

Upload Owned Photos and Images to Sites like Flickr

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Upload images and photos to image-sharing websites like Flickr. When you upload them, give them a permissive Creative Commons License.

Sites like Flickr where you can upload your images:

It’s debatable how much Flickr would help a brand directly. Still, if you create original images, photos, and other static visual content there is a way to increase your authority on the web through it.

The first thing to do with Flickr to feed your web authority is using the website display option in your profile. Here you can add the URL of your website or of any other website in your PBN (personal backlink network).

Second, you should upload your original photos and images to Flickr, and then give it an (if possible) permissive license. You could make the image copyrighted, but that isn’t of much use.

When you give your Flickr items a permissive license, meaning that others will be able to reuse your images, those who use it will create back-links to your Flickr profile for you.

That’s because they are bound, by the Creative Commons licenses, to always create a link to the original item.

After some time doing this, you will be amazed at how far your images travel, and how many back-links to your Flickr profile you get for free and without working for them too much.

Spread Owned Readable Documents through Sites like Scribd

There are many websites where you can upload documents, generally PDFs, and these are appropriately called document sharing sites. One of the most popular ones is Scrib. Another very popular one, and even less restrictive than Scribd,  is Archive.org. If you can create hefty content, say, more than 3000 words, you can edit that content to give it a branded media format.

A rule of thumb when crafting these kinds of documents is this: if you have other documents already in place, that you use as lead magnets (documents that can be downloaded only after the interested person enters her or his email address), make the documents to share in document sharing portals smaller than your lead magnets.

The format should be circular, booklet, or similar visually pleasing formats. These kinds of documents are a great opportunity to consolidate your brand style since you can put virtually anything in them, and customize them to a tee. Thus, they are a great opportunity to use your brand's logos, fonts, color palettes, images, photos, etc. The idea is to plant links to your websites and pages in them. If you have forms to capture emails, for which you give away lead magnets, you should also add links to those forms in the document.

You can easily do this with web apps like Canva, or even with word processors that can save to PDF, which today most of them are able to do. An overlooked thing about doing this is that when you create a PDF to share on the web, you can (and should) fill in the document's metadata, that the PDF format supports. Take advantage of this feature to optimize your document for SEO even more.

Contribute Disinterested Content to Web Forums

Web forums may seem an anachronistic channel for social interaction today, but they are still useful.

You can’t compare the speed and detachment of social media interactions, which seem ADHD-oriented, to the dedication, focus, and comprehensiveness of web forums.

If you are deeply invested in any topic, forums are one of the most valuable channels that you can use to both contribute and expand your knowledge.

The thing that you have to keep in mind when using community forums for authority farming is that almost any kind of self-promotion in them is frowned upon.

You should approach your membership to community forums in an honest, involved way, and not with mires to use them purely for promotion. That said, you can balance your disinterest contributions with promotion.

Keeping a tally of your contributions, be them your threads and/or replying to the threads of others. Keeping tabs about how much you are contributing selflessly allows you to (after a certain quantity of valuable contributions, I’d say more than five posts) post a self-promoting one without making it too obvious.

Other than that, you can always have a signature (most community forums have a signature feature) with a link to one of your pages or sites.

More Off-Page SEO by Contributing Dedicated Articles to Article Sites

This tactic is different from guest posts and directories of articles that don’t allow the item to be published elsewhere.

The kind of article sites I am referring to here is article silos where the users can copy the articles and use them as content for their pages and websites.

The users that download the articles for their use are obliged to keep your signature at the bottom, which is used to add a link to one of your sites or pages.

This tactic has a downside, and it is that if you contribute one of your articles to an articles site where users can copy the article for their use your article is bound to pop up unexpectedly in more than a website and if the content is the same, search engines may not value it (duplicate content).

There is one way to slightly mitigate this problem, and that would be that you spend the time and effort that it takes to spin the article each time you upload it to a new website. Still, that is not a foolproof solution.

You might have uploaded the article to five different article silo websites for others to use it, and you might have taken care of spinning them differently each time for them to be not the same.

Still, you can control the fact that from a single website many users may download the same version and publish them without spinning it themselves.

Maybe you could solve this problem by specifying a use clause that obliges each person who downloads the article to spin it, but I haven’t tried this and I haven’t seen it done.

Ways to spin an article

    You can use a spinning (also known as paraphrasing) tool online
    You can spin an article manually
    You can shuffle entier sections of the article
    You can shuffle around paragraphs and sentences
    You can add new paragraphs or sections or delete them

Uncommon Off-Page SEO Process: Constantly Help Others in Q-A Sites

The modality of this practice is ongoing and, once you start, you should commit yourself to performing this tactic for life. Or at the very least for a long time and to reach a high count of answers. Say 1000+ on each Q-A site.

Like the tactic of using community forums, you shouldn’t use your answers in questions and answers site to self-promote your pages or sites all the time.

The good part of doing this is that if you have a good cache of knowledge in the topics of your keywords, questions are a dime a dozen and, once you gather momentum, you’re going to get a flood of questions in your inbox.

Of course, on most of these sites, you can have a link to your website in your profile. Still, the trick is in finding questions to answers in which you can add inline links to your pages in your answers.

Offer Your Content Pages as Assets for 3rd Party Pages

When you find a well-crafted and SEO-oriented web page using your keywords, you find out if some of the topics related to that keyword, that you already wrote about, aren’t touched.

Brownie points if the page doesn’t have outbound links or a list of resources. If if you find such a page, then notify the owner and ask her or him to kindly link to your page with an inline link or in a resource section with the headline of your article as a link.

Outro: Any Off-Page SEO Tactics You Would Like To Share?

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I know that asking for the golden goose off-page SEO Tactics that bring you a ton of traffic may sound counter-intuitive. Still many people know that the more you give of what you really care about, the more you receive. If you are one of those persons, would you care to share them with the rest of us? Please do it in the comments below.

© Martin Wensley, 2022 — Strategy Guide with 20+ Off-Page SEO Tactics — Off-PageSEO