E commerce retailer eBay

 

Writing Assignment 5

Off page optimization is defined as the technique which helps the website to improve its ranking on the search engine results page. These factors function outside the boundaries of the web pages and these ranking factors are not directly controlled by the publisher. Off-page optimization basically deals in link building for SEO. Off page SEO is a long term and time consuming process. It includes acquiring backlinks to your webpage from the authority sites, social media, and social bookmarking. Off page factors work in the background to improve the search rankings. Off page SEO plays an important role in the backend. Without applying off page factors, surely your website can not rank. This is due to the major factors such as link building, social media, videos, blogging etc. If any website needs references from a website, it (website) should be socially active and should be shared amongst the communities of their niche.

The off-page optimization topic that interest me is social media. Its influence is amazing but often in class readings we here it is more of a “vanity” metric as far as likes and shares. I chose it to study it closer and how effective it is as an off page. The lines between social media marketing and search engine marketing are becoming increasingly blurred. In the past, they were looked at as separate and distinct aspects of marketing. But the reality is that they’re more intertwined than it seems. The website www.Moz.com states that two of the main goals of any work in SEO are attracting traffic to your site and earning links to help your site rank higher in SERPs. Both of those goals are designed to convince people to act, and social media can play an important role. Social media optimization is essentially using social media as a catalyst to grow your company’s online presence. While some companies tend to just set up a profile on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter to be where their customers are, SMO is about strategically creating, building and maximizing your social media plan to connect with your target audience. If you can find industry influencers on social networks, they are able to lend strength to your SEO efforts. An article in www.webfx.com says that instead of appearing as some aloof entity, let your brand come across like a friendly, neighborhood corner store. You can do that by staying active on social media sites and by starting a blog where you can let your audience get a feel for your brand’s flair.  

It has been assumed for a long time, there has been a correlation between the social shares a piece of content gets and how well its corresponding site or page does in search rankings. But even if Google isn’t directly using social share counts in their search algorithms, there ought to be some other explanation out there about why high share counts correlate with high organic search rankings. Recent research and analysis from our own Larry Kim suggests that it’s not just the number of social shares, but the engagement rate of social content that strongly correlates with higher organic rankings. That would be things like comments, likes, click-throughs on images, etc., that people on social share your content, and have a higher engagement rate, the more backlinks for that specific piece of content you’ll probably get. Social media is essentially a way to get a lot of free exposure (assuming your content is worth sharing). A graphic with strong information that is not well known can be very powerful. This example is one of them: Foods that Americans should stop eating shared by Mercola.com has gained over 700k shares.

According to Moz’s Open Site Explorer, this infographic has earned 50 backlinks, and ranked #2 on Google under “banned foods.

            If you have done any SEO at all, you’ve probably noticed that the stories that rank well tend to have high social share counts. Search engines like Google take social signal as an important metric for ranking web pages. These are considered rare, the extremely popular pieces of content that drive massive amounts of traffic to your site. Research shows that not the number of shares that matters, it's the engagement rate. Remarkably high social engagement rates correlate strongly with high organic search CTR, which correlates with high rankings. It means that click-through rate matters a great deal. It can be seen as like an invisible hand that helps determine whether your content succeeds or fails. What’s happening here is that Facebook Ads and news feed algorithm, Google AdWords, and Google organic search are all systems governed by machine learning systems that reward remarkable engagement with greater visibility.

            If you share your web page's link with your followers and the rest is done by them. If you write compelling content, it will get shared more and hence increase its chances of getting better rank in search results. Try to provide as much value you can to your followers so that they are loyal to you and love to share your content. Social bookmarking is a good way to do off-page SEO for your web pages. There are many of social bookmarking sites that help users bookmark your web page if they liked it. If your web page gets bookmarked more it sends good signals to search engines that your content is great and should be ranked higher.

            One survey found 50% of companies that aren’t succeeding with SEO aren’t integrating social media marketing. If you want a solid overall approach to online marketing, you need a healthy balance of SEO and SMO. In order to optimize your social media marketing campaigns, you have to have a strategy with clearly defined goals and objectives, do keyword research, optimize your profiles, content, and posting scheduling, and finally track your analytics with UTM codes. When used properly, social media can be a powerful component of SEO but its takes more than a simple understanding of likes and shares to make it effective.