We're all familiar with the on-page seo best practices and most of these techniques have become second nature to marketers and business owners alike. Title tag, meta descriptions, content structuring and image alt tags have become office chatter regulars in 2014. But while these techniques are tried and true, off-page SEO strategies continue to shift and sway as the algorithms developed by Google, Bing, Yahoo and others undergo routine changes. Let’s grab hold of some of the most important off-page factors of your 2014 SEO strategy.
Links
It is safe to purchase links?
Can I email a webmaster asking for links?
Is link building dead?
The one thing we can say for certain is that Google has been cracking down on individuals and companies that partake in aggressive and illegal link building strategies. But link building is far from dead.
Quality- Gathering quality links is a huge part of the battle. No one wants to go out begging for links, and you shouldn’t have to. If you have great content on your site and share it in a proactive fashion to grow a real audience, you’ll receive links back to your site naturally.
Quantity – One old adage in search engine optimization and link building in general has always been quantity and quality. If you’re not creating high quality links at a higher rate than your keyword competitors, you’ll likely lose the battle for rank. A battle that can lose your website hoards of traffic depending on the keyword you’re fighting for.
Paid – The answer is always no. Never pay for a link. This practice has gone the way of the dinosaur, and for good reason. Most of the sites that still sell links are very low quality in the eyes of Google and will have an adverse effect on your rankings. You’ll see results when you get real links from real sites that haven’t sold links.
Trust
One of the often overlooked factors of search engine ranking it trust. While old factors such as domain age and page rank have ultimately become less important, trust is becoming a more influential piece of the algorithmic puzzle Google is making for SEOs the world over.
Aside from receiving high quality links from sites like .gov or .edu, trust is about author recognition and brand recognition. Brands are highly influential as they receive a boost in ranking from being written about on a daily basis by fans and critics. Another strategy to consider is keeping the author responsibilities of you company blog to one person. One person developing and sharing content is much more beneficial in the long run, as spreading it out can cause the development of trusted authorship to become delayed.
Social
SEO professionals have been creating hype around the notion that social media is a huge search engine ranking factor and aside from google authorship, which has been fixed to keep non influential people out of the top search results, this hasn’t been the case. It is important to understand the connection between social media and search engine rankings. It is even more important to note that there is a correlation between social shares and high rankings, we just don't know the extent of its influence at this very moment.
Personalization
The quickest trick to make sure that you’re personalizing your website from a locality standpoint is to make sure your registering your geographic targets via your google webmaster tools. Another rule of thumb is to make sure you have registered your business in Google+. Although yet to be seen, we can imagine at some point, pages that your friends on social media visit will be more likely to show up in your search results.
Search engines are constantly evolving right in front of us and Google is quick to respond to SEO strategies with a zoo full of animals to unleash at those who don’t play by the rules. Keep in mind that your ranking strategy should start with great content. When you’re writing for your reader and not for Google, you’re sure to hit the ball out of the park.
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Emmett Hughes is an account manager at Stratus Interactive in West Chester, PA. In his spare time he enjoys Philadelphia sports teams, collecting rare vinyl and spending time with his friends and family. Find Emmett on Google+