Advanced-Search Engine Optimization (second chapter).
OFF-PAGE SEOs and some advanced concepts and techniques in SEO.
Now carrying forward my previous article on ON-PAGE SEO, in this article we will now look at what is OFF-PAGE SEO viz another very important feature of SEO and plays an important role in the SERP of the websites.
As the term suggests “Off-Page SEO” refers to all of the activities that you and others do away from your website to raise the ranking of a page with search engines.
Off-page SEO simply tells Google what others think about your site. For example, if you’ve got a lot of valuable links pointing to your pages, search engines will assume that you’ve got great content — the type that provides value for users.
Otherwise, why would people waste time linking to it?
There are several important factors that contribute to off-page SEO.
1.Brand(name) Mentioning:
Some studies have shown that if you have good content, a few backlinks, people talking about your brand, and some mentions on social media networks, then you are doing great. In simple terms, this means that you are doing right as far as off-page SEO is concerned. Social mentions can play a vital role in signal to search engines that people are talking about you.
Getting backlinks from the authentic websites have great advantages as when the search engine bots crawl and land your websites through another website it gives the impressions that you have got a good content because the good websites are giving links to your website.
Now the question arises how can we get backlinks from another website?
why any other website will give links to your website?
Now to know how to get backlinks and how other websites are getting links and are on the top of the SERP to know all these there are several tools one amongst them is “ahref” website this had a wide range of website and from where they are getting links and how much backlinks are there,etc because a very simple concept is that if another website can get backlinks then in a similar way we can also get backlinks.
2. Commenting:
Previously, leaving a comment on the other blog with a link back to your website was a fast and simple way to get new backlinks. That is until the strategy was abused and Google decided that irrelevant comment backlinks are useless. This was surely the best way to get backlinks but do comment and giving links are always useless?
No, as long as you’re doing it in the right way and with the right audience. It will help you build a relationship with the blog owner and other commenters.
3. Guest Author:
It’s a good way to get backlinks from other websites in a friendly way. There are several blogs open for the guest post. You just need to identify the keyword you’re interested in and then search on Google in this way:
- Keyword + “write for us”
- Keyword + “become a contributor”
- Keyword + “contribute”
- Keyword + “guest blogging”
In your post, you can easily give links and references to your websites.
4. Broken Link Building:
Broken link building is an interesting strategy. The purpose is to find broken links and contact the owner of the resource that has a broken link. The broken link could be one of your own pages that you would then provide the update to, or it could be an outdated competitor’s link that you would then offer to replace with one of your links to similar content. This will help in reducing the number of redirects and 404 pages, resulting in better user experience.
5. Questions & Answers:
Websites like Stack Overflow, Quora, etc have many questions and that need to have answers and discussions and you just need to search for your niche and related questions and answer them in a way that adds value to the question.
If you have written a guide on the same topic, leave a link back to your site so that visitors can easily find your content, but be careful with the links so that they don’t look like spam. If handled correctly, this strategy can be the game-changing off-page SEO tactic.
Now, these were particularly some of the OFF-PAGE SEOs.
But now let’s see some advanced tactics and techniques of the SEO: -
a). Schema markup in SEO
Besides traditional SEO practices, there are modern ways to improve your SEO and schema markup (also known as structured data or microdata) is one of these techniques.
What is schema markup?
Schema markup is a way to ‘describe’ your content to search engines in a way they can understand it.
This is done by adding pieces of code to your HTML that consists of pre-defined tags (semantic vocabulary) that search engines understand.
These are not visible to users but can be read by search engines when crawling your pages.
Here is an example of how schema markup looks like:
When Google or other search engines crawl a web page their primary goal is to find out what the page is all about.
The crawlers cannot view a website like a human but they process the HTML of a page trying to figure out different things like the meaning of the content, date published, author and other elements they find useful during the indexing process.
Schema markup makes your search snippets more informative and attractive also structured data enhances your website’s presence on the SERPS with rich snippets.
This means that your entry in Google search results will be more attractive and informative than others and this will lead to better CTR (click-through rates) and more visits to your website.
Currently, Google supports the following schemas:
- Article
- Book
- Breadcrumb
- Carousel
- Corporate Contact
- Course
- Critic Review
- Dataset
- Employer Aggregate Rating
- Event
- Fact Check
- Job Posting
- Livestream
- Local Business
- Logo
Now how to use schema markup?
some of it’s use cases are:-
Blog: If you have a blog, you can use the webpage schema to give Google information about your website, logo, name, etc and also the article schema for your articles and blog posts.
Ecommerce: For e-commerce websites, you can also use the products scheme which includes details about your product, price, name, reviews, etc.
Local Business: Local businesses can make use of local business schema as well as the website schema.
Now the question arises how to add schema markup in your website
- First either you change your whole Html code by yourself manually.
2. The second method is by using Google Structured Data Markup Helper
To make the manual process a bit easier, Google has a tool called Structured Data Markup Helper.
With this tool, you can visually tag your pages and generate the required HTML code but you still have to edit your HTML files or templates.
b). Less AJAX Request
Well using ajax request in your code has its own benefits and disadvantages:-
- websites that use AJAX to load content into the page can be much quicker and provide a better user experience
- BUT: these websites can be difficult (or impossible) for Google to crawl, and hence using AJAX can damage the site’s SEO.
The main problem of crawling AJAX is that it heavily relies on JavaScript which is a client-side scripting language that runs on Browser (Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Opera, Chrome, etc). Moreover different browsers support different features and functions and executing JavaScript requires additional resources and this increases the costs for the search engines.
Solutions for Crawling AJAX
The two most popular techniques that have been proposed over the years are the Hijax Approach and the AJAX crawling scheme of Google.
According to the Hijax technique
when you have a link that executes AJAX or JavaScript, you should not code it like this:
<ahref=”javascript:someFunction(`some page.html#parameter=1`)”>Click Me</a>
Neither like this:
<a href=”#”>Click Me</a>
Both of the above approaches are very popular to web developers but unfortunately, they do not provide a meaningful URL that can be used by the search engines. By using the Hijax technique the above link should be rewritten as follows:
<a href=”somepage.html?parameter=1″ onclick=”someFunction(`some page.html#parameter=1`); return false”>Click Me</a>
The above code will redirect the search engine to the targeted page if the JavaScript is turned off but at the same time it will fire up the AJAX code if the JavaScript is turned on (obviously the someFunction method should handle the click and load the AJAX content to the user). As a result, both the users and the search engines will be able to access the content of the linked page.
Of course, the above technique has several limitations since it does not cover cases where the AJAX content is created dynamically based on the input of the user.
The AJAX crawling scheme of Google
Google’s AJAX crawling scheme proposes to mark the addresses of all the pages that load AJAX content with specific chars. The whole idea behind it is to use special hash fragments (#!) in the URLs of those pages to indicate that they load AJAX content. When Google finds a link that points to an “AJAX” URL, for example, “http://example.com/page?query#!state”, it automatically interprets it (escapes it) as “http://example.com/page?query&_escaped_fragment_=state”.
c). Use techniques to Avoid Illegal Mirroring of the websites.
Well, mirroring of the websites has its own importance, it is used to avoid excess traffic on the same server which slows down the server. By mirroring the website we can have a copy of our complete website and can deploy it on another server to divert users to another server and reduce heavy traffic on a single server.
But here the main issue arises that if anyone mirrors your website and changes the content to some illegal and inappropriate content and deploys it on another server than it can reduce the authenticity of your website and can adversely affect your website’s SERP.
So it’s very necessary that you must use techniques to avoid illegal mirroring of the website.
So now here we have completed almost all the important factors that contribute to SERP of the websites.
I hope you all must have found this article useful.
