How To Avoid 5 Common Off-Page SEO Mistakes

We have talked about many times about how search engine optimization is beneficial for your business. In the last blog, we went over the two different components of SEO which was on-page optimization and off-page optimization. We went over the top 5 common mistakes of on-page SEO, here we will go over the 5 common mistakes of off-page SEO.

Off-page optimization is when another site is pointing to your site through many different ways, one of which is anchor text back-links. Backlinks are important because it is an indication to Google or any other search engine that the contents on your site is valuable. Now the question arises “how are backlinks an indicator of a good website?” If you have a useful or informative website you can most of the time get other sites to link to your website automatically due to the value of information you are providing. Wikipedia is a great example of this where many people are linking to their website because of the valuable information they are providing to users. As a result of this back linking, search engines like Google consider these types of websites as good quality due to the number of quality backlinks and therefore increase their SEO rankings. The 5 most common off-page optimization mistakes are as follows:

✓ Comment Spamming: Commenting options are used by many SEO people still unfortunately. Comment options are provided by bloggers and webmaster’s of many sites to get reviews of their readers. This allows them to see what people are interested in as well as make suggestions. Some SEO people comment on websites that have good SEO rankings to gain links that are pointing towards their own website. Unfortunately they forget that the links are valuable only if those links are coming to related webpages. Sometimes SEO people even put comments such as “Thank you” or “Nice Post” and insert their website link below that. Google knows this technique and the Google crawlers only see the first 100 links on any page they visit. This is a waste of time and is a technique of spamming that the search engines are aware of so stay away!

✓ Buying Links: Buying links is a spam practice from a search engines point of view and is not allowed. There are also many link building software’s that you can purchase that are able to create many backlinks within a couple of hours. This kind of software and buying links is viewed as a spam technique to the search engines. This should be avoided always when you are doing SEO.

✓ Article Marketing: Article marketing or posting is a good technique to get quality backlinks to your website. The most common mistake is when you are posting this same content on multiple websites. This creates duplicate content which has no SEO value and most importantly it is viewed as spam link building. Always provide unique, rich content as Google will reward you for your efforts.

✓ Directory Submissions: Directory submissions was one of the best ways to get one-way backlinks to your website. The most important part when submitting yourself to directories is to choose the right category in which your website will be submitted. If you are submitting yourself to non-related directory websites this will result in low quality backlinks which are useless. This practice should be clearly avoided when doing off-page optimization.

✓ Targeting Wrong URL: Many times we have seen that people are using their home page URL for creating anchor texts for their submissions. You should use the URL in which you are targeting a particular keyword within the page of your website that is relevant to this keyword. If you submit everything to your homepage you will not be leveraging the SEO value you can unlock with correctly related URL’s.

You should clearly avoid these 5 common SEO off-page optimization mistakes which will hurt your SEO efforts. As always if you need any help or advice on Search Engine Optimization, then please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group.