Off Page SEO Checklist for the Optimized Page

This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

Once you’ve completed our on page SEO checklist, it’s time to move on to off page SEO. But where to start? Backlinks are the obvious answer, but off page SEO is so much more than that. It can seem like a daunting task that intimidates even seasoned SEOs. That’s why we’ve broken it down into bite-sized pieces to help you get started in acquiring link juice and building trust and authority for your website.

Link Audit

Backlinks are still one of the most important ranking signals for helping your page improve its search rankings. Google wouldn’t have created the Penguin update or impose manual link penalties if backlinks, and their manipulation, didn’t matter. Every link building campaign starts with conducting a link audit and analyzing your backlink profile.

Check Your Current Profile

If your website has been around for a while, it has probably acquired a good amount of backlinks. However, there’s a good chance some of these links are actually doing more harm than good. It’s possible that SEO consultants or agencies you’ve previously worked with used tactics that have since gone from sitting in a bit of a gray area to violating Google’s guidelines, potentially working against you.

Performing a link audit will help you spot any unwanted, harmful links. It starts with gathering a list of all the links pointing back to your domain and their sources and anchor text, and then evaluating them to determine which ones are helping and which links are hurting your SEO. You can download a list of your backlinks in Google Search Console in Links to Your Site under Search Traffic. You can look at your links here a couple of different ways: by linking domain, by pages that have received links or by anchor text.

You can export these lists as either .csv files or as a Google document.

Link Analysis

The next step is to determine the value of your links and to spot any attempts at negative SEO or other low quality links you wound up attracting. To weed out low quality and spammy links, first look at the anchor text. A healthy backlink profile will have a natural mix of exact match, partial match, branded, page title and generic ("read more," “click here,” etc.) anchor texts. Your profile will look unnatural or spammy if you have too much of the following anchor text:

• Exact match: Putting keyword exact match anchor text in irrelevant or gibberish content is a common spam tactic. However, a profile of nothing but exact match anchor text is going to look very unnatural to Google regardless of the content it’s in. Too much and you could wind up with a link penalty.
• Irrelevant anchor text: This anchor text is completely irrelevant to your page content. The most common are Viagra and text related to casinos, gambling (particularly online poker) and payday loans.

These low quality links are actively hurting your SEO, even if Google hasn’t hit you with a manual penalty. If you can’t get the links removed, prevent them from being counted against you by using Google and Bing’s disavow link tool.

Link auditing tools such as Majestic or Kerboo can help you gather extra information about your links, giving each one a score based on the quality of the linking page. You can upload your list of links to Kerboo, or let the tool crawl the web and find links aimed at your domain. Filter and tag the links based on how you want to deal with them, adding low quality links to your disavow list as you go, to improve your link profile score. You can use Majestic to identify and score the pages linking to your site to help you gauge the value they pass.

Link analysis isn’t just for finding spam links. Now is the time to find your most valuable links as well. The name of this metric depends on the tool you’re using, but in general your best links will come from pages that:

• Have relevant page content
• Also link to other high quality sites
• Use links within the text of the page
• Are hosted on quality domains.

Use this list to find new opportunities or build a list of websites to target during a link building campaign or while conducting blogger outreach.

Link Reclamation

Check your backlinks, starting with your most valuable, for broken or dead links. Start by finding pages that return 404 errors. You can build a list based on Crawl Errors in Google Search Console, or use a tool like DeepCrawl or Screaming Frog. These tools will crawl your website and return a list of information about your URLs. Filter your list of URLs to find all that return a 404 error. Export the list to Excel and paste the list of URLs into the spreadsheet that had all your backlinks. Use the VLOOKUP function to map URL to status code (since you only copied over URLs with 404 codes, all your other pages will show blank in this column).

Using this list of broken backlinks, reclaim your links. You can do this two ways: set up a 301 redirect for the broken URL, sending everyone to the functioning page. However, even though 301 redirects pass full link juice now, Google still prefers fully resolved links. Send the linking site owner a short email with the updated URL. Point out that broken links cause a bad user experience and hurt their SEO, so replacing the broken link is a win-win situation. These should generally have a high conversion rate.

Social Media Engagement

Social media’s impact on SEO is far from a settled matter. Google has come out and explicitly said they don’t use social media factors like Facebook likes, followers and Retweets as a ranking factor. So, unfortunately, being really popular on Twitter and Instagram isn’t going to make you rank higher in SERPs, and links to your site on Facebook won’t pass you any link juice. Luckily, there are ways you can use your social media pages to help SEO:

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by Greg Snow-Wasserman via SitePoint