Have you heard about the differences between on-page and off-page SEO? Are you trying to decide which of these approaches will land you higher in the rankings?
SEO is a tricky and evolving industry. Any webmaster who wants to put their site at the top of the rankings needs to have a great understanding of on-page and off-page factors that improve searchability.
In this article, we will talk about on and off-page SEO, the differences between them, and how you can incorporate each into your ranking strategy. Read on to learn how to make on-page SEO and off-page SEO both work for you.
What Is On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO includes primarily elements that are found in writing or in the HTML code of your webpage. Your on-page SEO is only as strong as the keyword research that you have done. You need to make sure that you are targeting keywords that have a high search volume in the search engines you want to rank for.
Once you have your keywords in place, you want to optimize the information on your website to match those keywords. You’ll need to change certain elements on your website including:
- page title
- header structure
- meta-descriptions
- image alt text
- and URL structure.
The page title is one of the first things that Google will see and use to index your site. A meta description is the small amount of text that you see underneath the headlines on your website from the search engine page.
You’ll also want to be sure your headers, and the underlying text behind images on your site, are more friendly to the keywords you want to target.
How About Off-Page SEO?
Off-page SEO strategies focus on activities that you can do to improve your rankings outside of your own website. The primary focus of off-page SEO is obtaining backlinks to your site. This is extremely important because search engines like Google consider the number and quality of backlinks to be one of the most important elements to your overall ranking and relevancy.
A backlink is when another site links to the content on your website. For example, you could write a fantastic blog post on managing a construction warehouse, and another construction company may find your article useful and link to it in some of their own content.
Going about obtaining links in this way is called link building and should be the primary backbone of your off-page SEO strategy.
One of the things to consider about off-page SEO is that you want your backlinks to come from high-quality sources. This means that there is a lot of traffic and authority in the eyes of Google on the sites that link to you. For example, if you have a backlink to your site from NYTimes.com, Google will value this more highly than if the link comes from a smaller and obscure blog site.
There are other off-page SEO strategies including guest blogging and social media marketing which can benefit your site by continuing to drive organic traffic.
On-Page SEO: Pros And Cons
The major advantage of on-page SEO is that most of it is in your control. It’s relatively simple to go about targeting keywords that are appropriate for the authority of your site and changing the information on your website to reflect those keywords.
For many smaller websites, this can be done in an afternoon. Obviously, for a much larger business with more ambitious keyword targeting, this will need a dedicated drawn-out approach. Nonetheless, it is usually always much quicker to get your on-page SEO in top shape, compared to implementing off-page tactics.
The downside to on-page SEO is that it is relatively less important to major search engines like Google in the overall scheme of the ranking algorithm.
Off-Page SEO: Pros And Cons
Off-page SEO has the advantage of being the factor with the most weight in the eyes of Google. If you can improve your off-page SEO, you can see dramatic improvements in your ranking in a matter of months.
The downside is that link building takes time. Unless you have a complex set of link-building relationships with others also looking to obtain backlinks from you, you will be fighting an uphill battle to slowly gather links to your site.
There are different approaches to how to do this, but most of them involve some heavy lifting. You will need to write a significant amount of content for people to want to link back to your site. And you’ll need to have a steadily growing list of sites to connect with.
It’s important to make sure that you are following Google’s rules (and/or any search engine you’re trying to rank on), for obtaining backlinks to your site. Other off-page SEO tactics including social media marketing do require an active presence, and will likely be included in other aspects of your marketing efforts.
Understanding On-Page And Off-Page SEO
Designing your SEO approach can be arduous and complex if it is your first time thinking about it. There are some important pros and cons to understand about on-page and off-page SEO that will determine where you spend most of your effort.
At Beacon Creative Lab, we offer specialized package services to help you skyrocket your company site to the top of the rankings. We will work with you to increase quality traffic and drive more customers to your business. If you are interested in our SEO services, please contact us today.