SEO Off-Page & Social Signals

SEO Beyond the Page

While developing a well structured, standards compliant site with regularly updated, concise, valuable content, it is also important to consider elements beyond your pages. For SEO to be truly optimal, consider:

• Incoming Links—Contextually relevant, deeper level links are an excellent way to pull visitors into your site, while also directing spiders to crawl your content. Each authoritative incoming link is like a vote, which builds your site’s credibility, reputation, and search results visibility.
• Directories—Get listed in online directories for valuable incoming links. Apply to be listed, positioning your site as a unique, valuable, and relevant resource. Search for “directory + (your) niche” to find them. Directories to consider: Y and Best of the Web.
• Go Local—Submit your website to internet yellow pages and citysearch for valuable listings and links.
• PR Links—Public relations materials, such as press releases, white papers (a solution report), and interviews are unique ways to promote your website and gain incoming links.
• Community Sites—Websites that offer community created resources on topics of interest are another way to boost visibility and build site traffic. Sign up and publish on sites such as Squidoo or HubPages.
• Social Bookmarking—Promote your site and gain incoming links by posting interesting content or hyperlinks to internet content, which attain prominence through community votes. Try Reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon.
• Q&A Sites—The content of question and answer websites like Quora and StackOverflow is indexed by search engines. Participate to share knowledge, show expertise, and build positive exposure for your domain while gaining possible links.
• About Me—Create a directory “splash page,” a virtual business card on about.me that links visitors to content across the web.
• User Generated Content (UGC)—UGC can offer another method of adding new content to your site. Testimonials, reviews, ratings, polls, and guest posts are great ways of increasing engagement, boosting site traffic, and enticing spiders to crawl your site.

SEO & Social Signals

Recent updates in popular search engine algorithms are incorporating signals from popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to evaluate the relevance and authority of website content. These social signals can significantly impact search results.

• Vote—Each Facebook Like, Twitter share, and GooglePlus +1 offer search engines a way to gauge interest and appeal. Another tier of social sites, such as Reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon also endorse the value of web content through community votes.
• Influence—Social profiles, activity, and engagement will also impact the strength of social signals. Accounts with influence will have greater impact on the perceived value of shared content.
• Presence—Build a social media following by consistently contributing value and building trust. Earn followers who will endorse you through mentions, retweets, shares, or links.
• Sharable—Content with potential to be shared via social media include product descriptions, service information, reviews, testimonials, images, and videos. Unique, sometimes quirky content may capture attention and be share worthy.
• Relevant—Social appeal is important, but the keywords and content must relate to your business. Shared content should be relevant to a site’s theme.

What other off-page or social signal SEO tips would you include in this article?

For more information on how to improve search rank, see  SEO: 4 Key Considerations   or   SEO & Blogging.