13 Top Performing Offsite SEO Tactics

If you want to maximize the value of your search engine optimization, then you can’t ignore the tasks that can be accomplished offline. Although some might not actually call these tactics “SEO” by nature, they all still help you to get ranked in all search engines, build your brand, and improve your overall online reputation.

It all begins, however, with your online SEO tactics. None of these offsite SEO ideas are going to help you out if you haven’t fully optimized your site already with on-page techniques. If you haven’t done that yet, then get to work on finalizing an essential online optimization strategy first and then come back to these tips.

1. Create Communities

The first step to any offsite SEO campaign must be to control your online reputation. You can begin to this by joining social networking sites, creating online profiles, and extending the life of your page to all areas of your life. Reviews are an effective way to begin establishing a solid reputation, so talk to people you know and trust to write reviews about your site.

Online reputation is also gauged by how engaging you are on those social networking sites. Just starting a page on Facebook or beginning a Twitter account and posting links to them isn’t good enough today. You need to expect to reach out to people first before they’ll start reaching out to you. Take your time, build up your presence over weeks and months instead of hours and days, and you’ll create a foundation for your offsite SEO to be successful.

2. Craft Awesomeness

Blogging will always be one of the most effective offsite SEO techniques that can be used. Don’t confuse “website” with “blog” when it comes to your SEO. Blogs are considered to be separate from the primary site that you have. You must have value in the content of a blog for it to contribute to your ranking. Copied and scraped content, or words that have been put through a spintax filter, are going to kill of your blog AND your website fast.

Craft awesomeness through the composition of valuable content. You don’t have to write 10,000 words per day to provide people with the value they need. A 500 word blog post every other day is suitable enough to improve your offsite SEO.

3. Forum Participation

You can participate in forums without spamming them. For this offsite SEO tactic to work, there must be a focus on your purpose. Are you there to engage with the people on that forum? Or is your sole purpose to put up some links, talk about your stuff, and never read any of the conversation chains that exist? If you genuinely engage people, you’ll improve your SEO. If you do not, then you might see some black hat gains from your spamming, but eventually that will come back and potentially penalize you in the end.

4. Submit

Have you submitted your website to all of the search engines for indexing? Many search engines will index sites automatically, but not all of them will. If it’s a search engine, then submit your website so that it will get listed. Do not overlook website listings that can be included with the online version of the Yellow Pages. The online Yellow Pages, and even the online White Pages to some extent, are also search engines.

5. Think About Directories

People have mixed feelings about having websites listed on directories. The offsite SEO results are often dramatically delayed on directories and there are some spammy directories that should be avoided at all costs. Notable organizations have directories that are still in use and there is value in being listed on them, but if you don’t want to take the risk with this particular strategy, it is perfectly understandable.

6. Bookmark Effectively

Social bookmarking can increase web traffic by 4% per site that is used. The only problem with social bookmarking today is that the average website owner is spamming each site with all of their content. Use the PageRank tool to determine what your best pages are and then strategically bookmark these pages on social sites. Don’t just use social bookmarking for your pages either. Bookmark similar industry pages to yours, just ones that are outside of your niche, so that your account is seen to be of value.

Social bookmarking also requires strategic use of tagging. You’ll need to know what your best keywords happen to be and make sure that your keywords are relational to the content that is being bookmarked for this to be an effective strategy. If your best site keyword is “piano playing for beginners” and the content you’re tagging and bookmarking talks about how dogs like to chase cats in the backyard, you’ve just wasted everyone’s time and your money.

7. Source Baiting

People today want to know that they’re reading verifiable facts. If you are writing about specific topics that aren’t advice related, then you can get out of the site duplication issue by including source links to content. Only do this, however, if you’re linking to source materials that are 100% trustworthy. This is one of the easiest ways to improve your site’s overall link popularity.

8. Sharing Graphics

The average visitor will judge whether or not your site is worth looking at in 5 seconds or less. This means the graphics you create to correspond with your website must be influential and interesting in order to grab someone’s attention. By sharing photos from your site on photo-based social networks like Instagram or Flickr, you’ll be able to improve traffic over time because people are visually attracted to the perceived value that you’re providing.

Don’t forget to include graphics on your Facebook pages as well. Enticing graphics can stop users from scrolling through their news feeds to at least look at what you’ve offered. That’s half of the battle right there. Even if they don’t click, you’ve made a good first impression and that’s the ultimate goal of offsite SEO.

9. Write Real Prs

Press releases are a powerful way to begin generating deep links for your website. Don’t use the online press release distribution tools, however, because this can quickly penalize your site because it’s often viewed as a black hat technique. Use real press releases and submit them to every media source that you can find who might publish your materials. Most traditional media will duplicate offsite content with online content, which means a published PR will eventually hit the internet.

To make sure that you get the offsite SEO surge that a press release can provide, make sure to include these specific features.

1. A well written press release that doesn’t require any editing to be directly published.
2. Website links that lead directly to your home page or high PageRank pages.
3. Real value through something that is notable about what you are doing.

10. Share Your Expertise

The average internet user is going to be naturally attracted to the experts of whatever niche they’re researching. In order to be considered an expert, you must share your perspective as consistently as possible. This means taking advantage of guest blogging opportunities, responding to questions on other sites, or providing content for sites like About or Buzzle.

11. You Can’t Beat Free

There are a number of free classified advertising websites that are available today. Take advantage of this fact by placing a free ad on the site that will direct viewers to your primary site. You’ll want to make sure that you’re linking directly to your preferred pages, but do this with caution. Your site will likely have personal contact information on it. Someone on a free classified site will be two clicks away from having this information and being able to spam you heavily.

For this reason, you might wish to place free classified visitors to your site onto a specific squeeze or landing page that will help to weed out the spammers.

12. Be Consistent

For all of this to work properly, you’re going to need to provide a consistent message to everyone. This means your branding must be consistent, your engagement with visitors must be positive, and you must provide a sense of value in everything that you do. Without consistency, your expertise will be considered less valuable and that will reduce the number of visitors and prospects that are going to visit your site.

13. Go Over the Top

Sharing documents is a great way to share value. If you have PowerPoint presentations, PDF files, or specific research you’ve conducted, then make this data available online. It will brand your site and give you a better overall outreach.

Effective offsite SEO begins with your positive attitude. It then boils down to what your purpose happens to be. If you’re willing to form relationships and give out value before receiving value in return, then you’ll be able to improve your search engine rankings over time.