Learn Off-Page SEO Factors

What does off-page mean?

Off-page is a term used by SEO people to describe a search engine variable (of which there are possibly 200) that isn’t directly on the webpage you’re search optimizing.

For example, the keywords you put in your page title are a on-page SEO factor, but if my SEO Shrugged blog links from my site your webpage, that’s an off-page factor. This link from my website to yours (generally called a back link) is a crucial boost to your SEO. Google looks at my decision to link to your webpage as a vote of confidence.

In fact the foundation of Google’s algorithm rests on this very sort of thing. PageRank, “works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites.” Pretty cool!

The anchor text of these links backs as well as the quality of the site linking to you are also integral to your search ranking. Generally speaking, off-page SEO factors are things you can’t control. However, additional factors like total web traffic, social media followers, eliminating 404 errors, crawl errors and sloppy redirects will all help your off-page SEO.

What are other off-page SEO factors?

Other off-page factors include things like social shares, page views, time spent on page, and your websites domain authority. (Domain authority is a metric created by a leading SEO industry company called SEOMoz. It assesses the entire strength of your webpages, link backs and more to give you a domain authority score out of 100. Use their domain authority and page rank calculator here to see how your website is doing.)

Search is becoming super refined so things like a person’s search history and search location come into play. If a visitor is Googling in San Francisco for movie showtimes, Google will only return showtimes from theaters in San Francisco.

If you’re searching for information about diet tips, Google might direct you to a blog or website that you’ve previously visited to learn about weight loss and exercise. You may have tweeted an article you saw on this site or +1’d it. Google takes this as an indicator that your were happy with your visit to this website, and that you’ll find information you need the second time around.

Learn how you can measure your SEO efforts here and other great SEO info in the SEO Shrugged blog. 

To schedule a free SEO consultation, email corttafoya@gmail.com.