Offsite Content Marketing

What is and isn’t SEO Offsite Content Marketing?

I will begin by explaining what offsite content marketing strategies use to be before Google updates changed to deter spammy SEO tactics and improve the search results being displayed. Back in 2013, just before the Penguin algorithm (Google update), building offsite links of any kind would make your site become both credible and authoritative based on the targeted keywords/phrases found within hyperlinks pointing to your website. An example of this would be, Google crawling a website (other than your own domain) to find a hyperlink pointing to your website/domain with hyperlink text set as ‘Plumbing Company’ which will inform to Google that this site must be a Plumbing Company and that is why someone would link to this website with a hyperlink of ‘Plumbing Company’.

Before the Penguin update, if Google crawled and indexed your website, they would than check your backlinks (links pointing towards your domain) to see if you had X amount of links. In a nut shell, a website would appear higher in search results due to a heavy number of backlinks pointing towards its domain, regardless of where they came from and what type of domain it came from. Many SEO companies begin to take advantage of this and started to host and create a network of random service-based websites that they would control and create link farms. A link farm is a website with the sole purpose of writing a wide variety of simple and basic blogs that can be used to link from the comment section to a domain. If the blog was about teeth whitening, then you would likely find X amount of hyperlinks within the comment section of the blogs hyperlinking back to a wide variety of different dentists in order to pass the link juice (authority that website holds) to your website, thus informing Google that you do indeed offer that service. The quantity of links is what got you to begin showing up on the top pages of search engines for targeted keywords.  With the right tools and information, it seemed like becoming relevant for the services that your company provided was a matter of how many times Google saw a certain keyword being hyperlinked to your domain. This was before to determine what level of credibility/relevance a website may have for a certain type of keyword.

Along with Penguin, there is an algorithm by Google called Panda, which was released in 2011. Panda & Penguin go hand in hand. With Panda negatively affecting websites that have poor/irrelevant information on the website and Penguin negatively affecting websites that have excessive backlinks or irrelevant backlinks.  Understanding the how and what a search engine is looking for can be the difference between a successful online marketing strategy and an incorrect one. The overall focus of these updates was to remove websites with poor quality content and keyword stuffed content from the search results.

Learn more about how HK Consulting, Inc. approaches Panda and how it affects both your onsite and offsite content marketing. Visit our ‘Onsite Content Marketing’ page for more information.

What type of backlinking should you focus on?

When it comes to backlinking and creating relevant offsite content to link from… always think naturally. Would it make sense to hyperlink to a website with a keyword instead of that company’s business name? In some cases, yes, it would still be beneficial, but this depend solely on the ratio your website has to a specific targeted hyperlink. This information can be found quickly if you have optimized and setup Google Search Console (Google Webmaster Tools) on your website.  What makes the most sense is to consider how real life ‘people’ in day to day conversation would talk about a company. In most scenarios it doesn’t make conversational sense to reference a law firm with  ‘Lawyers in Salt Lake City’, because if two people were talking about this law office providing a service, they would refer to it by it’s business name, lawyer name or anything with an overall brand that implies that specific business. Depending on your services, a good strategy can be to withhold a 70:30 ratio for hyperlinking. The 70% being a link with your company name as the hyperlink for branding your business, opposed to the 30% focusing on specific keywords/services/phrases and other unique identifiers.

Contact Us for an SEO Audit

Starting with the correct marketing strategy is critical to find success on all search engine platforms including Google, Bing and Yahoo. Getting your business name indexed around the web can be as important and effective as any form of advertising! Driving new organic, deferral and direct traffic to your domain is our main goal.

Visit our Contact Us page to see how you can improve the overall presence of your business on the web.