On-Page SEO vs. Off-Page SEO

SEO is a wonderful, unpredictable thing. I love this topic because as far as I know, no one out there knows everything when it comes to SEO. The search engines don’t exactly publish yearly how-to’s on manipulating their algorithms. It is very much… know the basics, learn as you go, test test test, he said/she said type of thing that changes ALL THE TIME.

When we discuss SEO there are many different factors that go into influencing your ranking on Google.

They all contribute in various ways, some more important than others depending on your business objectives.

If you’re solely looking to have your website recognized by search engines, then implementing SEO tactics on your website alone would probably be your focus.

If your goal if grander than this, like you want to rank page one for every competitive keyword in your industry, then you will want to look at the bigger picture…and get ready for a journey.

On-Page SEO and off-Page SEO: The former deals with what you can do on your own site to increase your rankings, while the latter deals with what you can do outside your site to influence and raise your rankings.

Let’s dive into each:

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO tactics are what you can do within your own website, page, or landing page to influence your weight and ranking on Google or the other search engines.

You’ll hear often that content is king. Well that’s because it is king in the world of on-page SEO but there are other areas that you need to optimize as well to be favored by Google.

Let’s go through these:

• GOOD content:
  I capitalize good here because gone are the days that you could keyword stuff shitty articles and call them content. Google caught on to that and now grades content with more scrutiny. Google implemented key factors in its algorithm to determine the best search results for its clients, the searchers. They use the acronym E-A-T to explain this, short for Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. Another ranking factor is time-on-page which tells Google that people are finding what they are looking for, weather answers, solutions, entertainment etc. within that page and that people are not “bouncing” from the page. Along with these, you want to be sure your content contains the keywords that your audience may be looking for in their searches. If your content is good and well-written these with be present organically but you should always be cognizant of this by specify the subject several times throughout the text content.
• Title Tags – Your primary page title. The one at the top. This should clearly explain what the post is about using 10 words or less.
• Meta-Description – This is basically a brief summary of your blog post. Search engines display the meta description in search results under the page title.
• URL – This usually auto-generates from your headline but just incase, be sure it isn’t too long and that it includes the keywords in your headline.
• image alt text – When using images it is highly important to add titles and ALT text to these. This helps tell Google what the image is and the context it is being used for. It also adds additional keywords in your post.
• Back links – Internal links are most useful for establishing site architecture and spreading link equity.
  
  I go into further detail in this post I wrote on, How to build a Blog Post that Google will love.

Off-Page SEO

Optimizing for off-site ranking involves improving a site’s popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority. This is accomplished by others that are reputable sources on the Internet (pages, sites, people, etc.) effectively “vouching” for the quality of your content.

External (In-bound) Links:

You’ll hear a lot of back and forth about this topic but top SEOs still believe that external links are the most important source of ranking power. If done fraudulently, as in buying links, they will be detrimental to your site or page. Even gone are the days that paying for online press releases may not be worth the money just for the links. This is all referred to as black-hat SEO and frowned upon ;(…Google has caught on to all these non-organic schemes and said, no way José.

The best way to achieve these are producing great content that people want to share. That doesn’t mean you can’t ask them to share it. 

Here are a couple ways to achieve this the right way:

• Content sharing: Give your content to other sites that have authority and ask them for a link back.
• Guest posting: This is a great way to position yourself as a thought-leader and get a quality link back. A lot of poplar websites like Entrepreneur.com and Inc.com have contributor programs that you can apply for. They even provide you with guidelines to help with your success and readership rates.

Today, the major search engines use many metrics to determine the value of external links. Here are some that I found on Moz.com:

• The trustworthiness of the linking domain.
• The popularity of the linking page.
• The relevancy of the content between the source page and the target page.
• The anchor text used in the link.
• The number of links to the same page on the source page.
• The number of root domains that link to the target page.
• The number of variations that are used as anchor text to links to the target page.
• The ownership relationship between the source and target domains.

Non-Link Off-site SEO

While earning link backs from reputable sites is the most common practice of off-page SEO, almost any activity done off your website or page that improves your search engine rankings is considered off-page SEO. So pretty much marketing or digital interaction in general. If you’re driving traffic to your website, that is good for your rankings. And if they stick around that is even better, remember time-on-page.

• Organic social media
• Press mentions
• Linked and unlinked brand mentions
• Influencer marketing
• Paid ads on Google and Social media sites like Facebook and Instagram (just for the traffic factor).

https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2018/06/13/off-page-seo

The most important thing to always remember is to create value. Take the time, do the work, be persistent and authentic, and your rankings will come.

Here is a great infographic from Wordstream.com for those of you that enjoy a good visual 😉

Thanks for reading! Be sure to check out our other posts on A Big Digital Hug.

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