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On-Page vs. Off-Page SEO

The Differences Between On-Page and Off-Page SEO

What is Website SEO? 

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. There are two crucial categories to a successful SEO campaign: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO looks at what your site (or a particular page) is about while off-page SEO looks at how authoritative and popular your site is. What you rank for is largely determined by on-page factors, while how high you rank in the search results is largely determined by off-page factors.

So with all this talk of on-page and off-page SEO, how does SEO actually work? Google (or any search engine you’re using such as Bing or Yahoo!) has a crawler that goes out and gathers information about all the content they can find on the Internet. The crawlers bring all those 1s and 0s back to the search engine to build an index. That index is then fed through an algorithm that tries to match all that data with your query. For the optimization portion of SEO, this is where the content writers place information on a website or page so search engines will be able to understand what they’re seeing, and the users who arrive via search are seeing relevant information based on their query. Optimization can be everything from making sure the title tags and meta descriptions are informative to including internal links that point to pages that contain high-quality content. (Source: https://moz.com/learn/seo/what-is-seo)

4 On-Page SEO Strategies

On-page SEO is the act of optimizing different parts of your website that affect your search engine rankings and is something you have control over by changing directly on your own website. Below is a detailed look at 4 on-page SEO strategies:

 

  • Title Tags & URL Structure
    • Title Tags: A title tag is an HTML element that specifies the title of a web page and is displayed on search engine result pages as the clickable headline for a given result. To improve your on-page SEO, place your targeted keyword into the title tag of each page on your site.
    • URL Structure: A URL consists of a protocol, domain name, and path (which includes the specific subfolder structure where a page is located). To help boost your on-page SEO, place keywords into your URLs if possible. However, do not go changing all of your current URLs just so they have keywords in them. You shouldn’t change old URLs unless you plan on redirecting your old ones to the new ones.
  • Page Content
    • The content on your pages needs to be useful to visitors. If they search for something specific to find your page, they need to be able to find what they’re looking for when your page pops up. Your content needs to be easy to read and provide value to the end-user.
  • Alt Text for Images
    • Alt text is an attribute added to an image tag in HTML. This text appears inside the image container when the image can’t be displayed and by inserting relevant keywords while accurately describing the image, it will help search engine crawlers better understand your page’s content.
  • Internal Linking
    • Linking internally to other pages on your website is useful to visitors and it’s also useful to search engines. Internal links connect your content and give search engines an idea of the structure of your website. They can establish a hierarchy on your site, allowing you to give the most important pages and posts more link value over other, less valuable pages.

 

4 Off-Page SEO Strategies

Off-page SEO focuses on increasing the authority of your domain through the act of getting your links on other websites. The biggest off-page SEO factor is the number and quality of backlinks to your website. Below is a detailed look at 4 off-page SEO strategies:

 

  • Directory Submissions
    • Directory submission is the practice of submitting your website URL and its details on the web to a directory under a particular category. Directory submissions are then used to increase backlinks to your website permanently through other sites.
  • Social Signals
    • Sharing content and links on social media helps build website authority! As you keep publishing content that gives your audience the valuable information they’re looking for, it will, in turn, earn you backlinks. By focusing on building an engaged network of social media followers, your content will have more relevant places to live.
  • Guest Posting/Blogs
    • By creating posts and/or blogs for websites that are related to yours, you’ll be generating links on other sites that direct right back to your own pages.
  • Link Building
    • Link building is the process of getting other websites to link back to your website to drive referral traffic and increase your site’s authority.

 

On-page and off-page SEO work together to improve your search engine rankings in complementary fashion; however, SEOs generally advise getting your on-page SEO in order before focusing too much on off-page SEO. Happy optimizing!!

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