Your search engine optimization strategy can be divided into two different categories:
- On-Page SEO
- Off-Page SEO.
Both are crucial in the success of an SEO campaign, but they’re on completely different sides when it comes to improving the search engine rankings. To understand the difference, you have to understand how the search engine works.
There are two main buckets which search engines look at while analyzing your site as compared to the other sites on the web.
- On-Page SEO looks at what the site/page is about
- Off-Page SEO looks at how popular your site is
What is On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO, also referred to as on-site SEO is the act of optimizing the different parts of your website which affect the search engine rankings. This is what you have control over and can change on your own website. Here are some of the biggest factors:
- Title Tags: Put your targeted keywords in the title tag of each page on the website. Companies offering digital marketing services in India offer many best practices that go into writing an effective title tag.
- Headings: Headings are the largest words on the page, and for that reason, search engines give them a little more weight than your other page copy. You should incorporate the targeted keywords in the headings of each web page but make sure that you accurately reflect the page content.
- URL Structure: Put keywords into your URLs if possible. However, do not change all the URLs just so they have keywords in them. You should not change the old URLs until unless you are planning to redirect the old ones to the new ones. Consult an expert before doing this.
- ALT Text for Images: The content management system should allow you to add something called the ‘ALT TEXT’ to all images on the website. This text is not visible to the average visitor. It is used by screen reader software to helo blind internet users understand the content of the images. The search engines crawl in a similar way so insert some relevant keywords while describing the image.
- Page Load Speed: Google wants the users to find what they are looking for as quickly as possible to offer the best user experience. Hence, optimizing the pages to load faster can help the sites rank higher in the search results.
- Page Content: The content on the pages needs to be useful to people. If they search for something too specific, they should be able to find it. It needs to be easy to read and provide value to the end user.
- Internal Linking: Linking internally to other pages on the website is useful to visitors and it useful to search engines.
On-page SEO ensures that the site can be read by both potential customers and search engine robots. With good on-page SEO, search engines can easily index the pages, understand what the site is about and navigate the structure and content of the website, thus ranking your site accordingly.
What is Off-Page SEO?
Off-page SEO focuses on increasing the authority of the domain through the act of getting links on the website. The biggest off-page SEO factor is the number and quality of backlinks to the website. Some examples of ways you can build the website are:
- Creating valuable content which people want to link.
- Social media shares of your content that ultimately generate links.
- Outreach e-mails to influencers in your industry.
- Guest blogging on sites related to yours.
While link quality is important, content creator and SEO professionals are realizing that link quality is now more important than link quantity. Creating shareable content is the first step to earn valuable links and improve the off-page SEO. Companies offering digital marketing services in India say that SEOs used to believe that buying links was a valid way of link building; however, Google will now penalize you for buying links in an attempt to manipulate page rank. You can also be penalized for submitting your links to link directories whose sole purpose is to increase your domain authority. Hence, quality wins out over quantity when it comes to link building.
Which one is more Important?
It’s not about choosing between on and off-page SEO. They work together to improve your search engine rankings in a complementary fashion. However, SEOs generally advise getting the on-page SEO on point before getting too much focus on off-page SEO. One of the best SEO company in India says that balancing the two will make the website ‘bilingual’ so that the users can understand it as well as search engine robots – and that’s how the ranking starts to improve.
