On-Page SEO And Off-Page SEO: The Only Guide You Need

Let’s face it – SEO is nowadays a vital part of every company. In order to rank high, one must combine the best practices and make most of their efforts against all the new algorithms that Google pulls out on a regular basis. If you thought that SEO refers to writing optimized content only, you are definitely wrong. Today, we are talking about the two most vital elements of search engine optimization – on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

The Importance Of On-Page And Off-Page SEO & Their Difference

Simply put, these are the main categories that help in classifying the search engine optimization. Both of them are crucial to the success of a specific SEO campaign – yet they are both on completely different sides of the river when it comes to ranking higher on the search engines.

While on-page SEO is all about your site and what it has to offer, off-page SEO revolves around its authority from a third-person perspective – as a differentiator on how popular or authoritative it is. In other words, on-page SEO determines what you rank for, and off-page SEO determines how high you rank.

The following equations may show you how vital both of these categories actually are when it comes to your search engine optimization – and why you should take into account both of them with similar efforts.

• Bad on-page SEO + bad off-page = no rankings at all
• Bad on-page SEO + good off-page SEO = mildly competitive keyword rankings
• Good on-page SEO + bad off-page = no competitive keyword rankings
• Good on-page SEO + good off-page = competitive keyword rankings

As you can see, both of these practices need to be implemented so that your website ranks and is visible among the competitors online. Below, we are listing the main aspects of both on-page SEO and off-page SEO in detail.

On-Page SEO: What Does It Comprise Of?

So far, we said that on-page SEO is all about the act of optimizing your website to rank online. Moreover, it revolves around the practice of optimizing different parts of it that are crucial to your search engine rankings.

So, on-page SEO is basically all the stuff that you have control over and can edit or modify on your page, such as:

• Title tags – Your title tags need to include the targeted keywords. They also need to be short and punchy and most importantly – effective to grab the reader’s attention from the very start.
• Headings – There are different levels of headings (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5) which are also known as subheadings. Believe it or not, Google likes indexing the content from the headings and even gives priority to it rather than the actual text that you are using. That being said, you should make use of the weight of this content and make sure to include keywords but also make it short and descriptive.
• URL structure – Your keywords also need to go into the URLs. However, you should definitly not change all of your current URLs so that they have keywords in them. If you do that, make sure to redirect your old ones to the new ones or hire a professional to do it.
• Alt text for images – Even the images are indexed by search engines which is why you need to optimize them accordingly. The main aspect of optimizing an image is the alt text – which is part of every content management system and the part where the focus keyword should stand.
• Fast-loading pages (page load speed) – Your page loading speed matters – just as much as the responsiveness of your website and its ability to fit on screens and devices of all sizes. So, make sure to optimize your pages to load faster by reducing their size and doing other things.
• Page content – Your page content matters. In a nutshell, what matters is how effective, descriptive and keyword optimized it is. The search engines appreciate relevant, informative and attention grabbing optimized content more than ever before.
• Internal linking – Make sure to link between your internal pages for the maximum effects.

Now let’s continue with the importance of off-page SEO and its main elements.

Off-Page SEO: What Does It Include?

While on-page SEO is all about the elements on your website, off-page SEO is essentially a process of increasing the authority of your domain through the act of getting links from other (relevant) websites. There is a score known as Domain Authority (in short DA) which calculates how authoritative your website is compared to other sites – and how authoritative other sites are in case they link to you.

Now, the biggest off-page SEO factor is the number and quality of the backlinks (the links that go to your website). So, the best ways to build links to your website include:

• Creating awesome and unique content that people want to link to because it is valuable and centered around a popular topic
• Social media sharing of your content that lets you generate links
• Outreach emails to influencers in your industry that can link to you
• Guest blogging on sites similar to yours – where you or someone else can write and point to your website

Remember, link quality is more important than link quantity nowadays – so make sure that every website that links to yours is of relevancy and (at least some) authority.

A Final Word

In the end, there is no ‘better’ SEO practice out there as both on-page SEO and off-page SEO are crucial to a well optimized website. The work that they do together is what ranks your website, makes it easily searchable and ultimately what gives you traffic that you can convert to customers.

How well do you optimize your site on and off page? Let us know in the comments!