OffPage Optimization
The ranking in the search results is improved not only by optimizing the website itself, but also by taking measures outside the website. For the most part, these can only be influenced passively. In general, it is intended to improve the reputation of a website.
Generate backlinks
First, a few terms should be explained:
- Page Rank: Evaluation of a website based on its incoming links. However, the content of your own website is not rated, which is why the "Page Rank" does not in principle say anything about the trust and substantial content of a website. It is no longer used as the sole criterion.
- Link Popularity: Number of incoming links (so-called backlinks) that refer to your own website. The backlinks are simply counted. The "Link Popularity" only provides quantitative information on the backlinks.
- Domain Popularity: Key Performance Indicator (KPI), which also takes into account the variety of domains of the backlinks. Because it makes a big difference, for example, whether 30 backlinks come from a single domain or from 25 different domains.
- Domain Trust: Trustworthiness and seriousness of a website.
Increasing Domain Popularity
"Domain Popularity" can be increased by ensuring that as many links as possible are placed from different link sources. The more websites link to your own website, the higher the reputation of your own website and the better it is ranked.
You should make sure that the linked websites are relevant to the topic, have a good reputation and, ideally, are heavily frequented themselves. These high-quality backlinks also bring more visitors to your own website, which in turn gives Google and Co. more user signals for evaluation.
Important: Under no circumstances should you have backlinks to websites that are classified as dubious or even on any blacklist!
Tip: The active generation of backlinks can be very time consuming. You can, for example, encourage users to voluntarily link on their website through unique and high-quality content!
Use social media
Google and Co. rate the social media platforms like any other website. However, since the data on these platforms changes far too quickly, the so-called "social signals" are very likely not used to evaluate a website. These include, for example, "Likes", "Shares" and others. Furthermore, the bots cannot access all pages.
Nevertheless, the number of backlinks to a website is evaluated. If a website is linked from a heavily frequented "social media" page, then many visitors will also see this link and very likely click it too. This increases the traffic to the linked page, which in turn makes it more valuable.
Tip: When using links in social media, you should always make sure that the posts there are of high quality, that the links are tailored to a specific target group and that they also have a certain relevance to the topic.
To what extent the backlinks or the "social signals" actually influence the ranking remains a matter of dispute.
