We divide our search engine strategy between two categories – on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Though both are very different strategies, they are both essential for improving SEO performance.
If you’re looking for a simple definition of these two strategies, here it is: On-page SEO is what your site (or page) is about. Off-page SEO is about how popular or authoritative your site is.
If you’re looking for more detail, keep reading.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is the process of ensuring that your site is readable to search engines so they know what your site is about. You want your site readable so Google picks up on the keywords you want to rank for. On-page SEO includes the things you yourself have control of and can change on your site.
These are the biggest components:
TITLE TAGS
Each page on your site has a title tag. Put your targeted keywords here.
HEADINGS (H1)
Usually the largest words on the page, headings are seen by search engines as a little more important than the other page copy. For that reason, it’s a good idea to use your targeted keywords in your headings. Just be sure the headings accurately reflect your page content.
URL STRUCTURE
If possible, put keywords into your URLs. But don’t go and change all of your current URLS unless you plan on redirecting your old ones. You should seek out a professional if you plan to do this. Regardless, just make sure any URLs from here on out have your targeted keywords in them.
ALT TEXT FOR IMAGES
For each image you have, you should have an Alt Text. Most content management systems should allow you to do this. Alt text isn’t seen by the average user, but is used by screen reader software to help blind internet users understand what your images are. Search engines read these Alt texts too in a similar way, so you should put some relevant keywords into the alt text. Just make sure they are accurately describing the image.
FAST-LOADING PAGES, OR PAGE LOAD SPEED
If you want to rank higher, you should make sure your pages are optimized to load faster. Google wants to give their users what they’re looking for as quick as possible so if you make your website speedy then your site should rank higher.
PAGE CONTENT
The content on your website should be useful to people and help them find what they’re searching for. It should be easy to read and understand in order to benefit both the user and search engines.
INTERNAL LINKING
Having links on your pages that bring people to other pages on your website is useful to both your visitors and to search engines. It’s useful because it improves usability and navigation (for human users and search engine crawlers), increases page views and brings people to other content (which can increase conversion rate!).
These are some of the things that you can take control of to better your on-page SEO. Improvements like these will let search engines know what you want your site to rank for, so don’t neglect them. And now that search engines know what to rank you for, let’s get into how you can get these rankings higher by going to the other side of the SEO coin… the off-page SEO.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is the process of increasing the authority of your website through link building. Links are like the currency of the web. Every time a page links to another, it’s a vote for the value of the page being linked to. So, the biggest factor in this process is the number and quality of backlinks to your website. Here are some great ways to build links to your website:
- Create good content that people actually want to link to because it’s valuable to them
- Share your content on social media because that ultimately generates links
- Relationship link building. Build relationships with other influencers in your industry and this will likely lead to links
- Guest blogging on sites related to yours. These guest posts will have links back to your site
The quality of the links you are getting is more important than how many links you get. If you are creating shareable and valuable content then you are on your way to earning valuable links and improving your off-page SEO.
By combining both of these processes you increase your rankings and therefore your bottom line. Through on-page SEO you get the word out about what your business is and does, and through off-page SEO you gain popularity and authority for your business within the world wide web.
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