What are the most effective off - site SEO strategies?

Let me answer your second question first: no, off site SEO is not purely link building. Technically, link building isn’t even search engine optimization. It’s just link building.

If you could know which links will help and which links will not help then you could optimize for search through link building but that is not possible; you’re just shooting blindly in the dark and people who claim that SEO only needs links get lucky for a while until the search engines catch up with them.

Off site search engine optimization includes a number of different skill sets and practices. Here are just a few:

• Managing search engagement
• Managing resource engagement
• Managing message engagement
• Creating visibility for a site that causes people to search for it
• Optimizing for site search for the site on other sites

Your task in off site SEO is to create visibility for a compelling message that attracts attention and spurs interest in your site. You want to be found on other Websites when users run searches on those sites. Powerful site search opportunities exist on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, on news sites that publish articles mentioning Websites, on Web directories and forums, and on very popular blogs that cover a lot of topics.

You have to decide where you will engage with search. You cannot possibly optimize for all the available search systems out there. Most of them won’t include your site name or URL in their content anyway. But search engagement goes well beyond Google (which only powers less than 10% of all Web traffic).

If you can publish substantial content about your site on other sites where that content may appear in search results (either main Web search results on Bing and Google or in site search results) then you should optimize that content to the best that you can. If all you do is just drop links you are wasting good resources.

The message you create on every site you work with is equally important. It should be informative, compelling, interesting, and unobscured by nonsense like “keyword research”. New keywords are created every day as people become interested in new topics. There is more advantage in creating your own keywords than in chasing keywords that everyone else is chasing (especially if you only do that through links, which is the least efficient way to optimize for search).

Anyone who thinks that link building is off site SEO hasn’t even begun to learn about what real off site SEO is. Start looking at the entire Web as an environment where information is shared and found and ask yourself how you can be a meaningful, useful part of that conversation while creating visibility for your site.

Sometimes the easiest off site SEO strategy consists of publishing something on your site that people discuss and share on other sites, but when you take your optimization to other people’s sites don’t waste your opportunities by just dropping links. Links are the last thing you should be thinking about in off site SEO.