On-Page & Off-Page SEO For Beginners
Once you delve into the world of SEO, you’ll most certainly come across the terms on-page and off-page SEO.
It may sound a bit daunting, but there is no reason why it should be.
They are both great starting points for making your website SEO ready – lets dive in.
On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO organises your website so that it is set up to promote your chosen search keywords and phrases. The keywords and phrases are chosen that perfectly reflect you and your business’s services, and what you’re hoping to gain traffic for, from Google and other search engines.
Your on-page content should of course primarily be produced to answer your potential clients’ questions and to help visitors understand the purpose of your site. However, your on-page efforts should also be about ensuring all the elements on your web page are easy to understand by the crawling search engines.
There are several elements that you need to employ to ensure your on-page SEO is where it should be:
- Page/Post titles – these are important. You need to make your titles scream out “CLICK ME”! There’s not really an exact template for writing compelling titles, but try putting yourself in your target audience’s place and write something that will appeal to their interests.
- Make it descriptive, include your unique selling point, and any keywords you are trying to rank for.
- Make sure your URLs are also descriptive and include your keyword. This can be achieved by altering your permalink structures.
- Optimise any images and make sure the alt-tag description is included.
- Finally, make your content easy to read and well structured. Use short sentences and small paragraphs to make reading easy.
Off-Page SEO
If you have done everything to ensure your On-Page SEO is tip-top, then Off-Page SEO is the magic tricks that bring customers/visitors to your website.
When we talk about Off-Page SEO, we are referring to anything that happens outside of your website. I guess it could also simply be called online marketing and is just like good ol’ fashioned public relations.
Essentially, when you work on your Off-Page SEO, you are improving your brand’s global presence by establishing a respected brand and a sense of authority around what you are saying. not only on your website, but also on other websites. The idea is that other authoritative websites will trust you enough and back up what you are saying, by linking back to you.
Trust me when I say Google will notice and appreciate this, and in turn offer your website as a solution in its search results.
Off-Page SEO covers elements such as social media, link building, and local SEO.
The key elements briefly are:
- Links – Links are the building blocks of the internet. All search engines use links to judge how valuable your content is. Getting links from high authority sites in the same niche as you will add to the authority of your website.
- Social media – although not essential for ranking in the search engines, it does give you an additional channel to interact with your customers.
- Local SEO – if you are a business that relies on local traffic and bricks and mortar shopfront, local SEO can make the difference between visiting your business and the one down the road.
To conclude, both On-Page and Off-Page SEO have their respective roles that play into how successful your website will be in reaching the ranking place that you desire.
One goes hand in hand with the other.
If your On-Page optimisation is top-notch, but if in any way Google considers that the quality of your brand is weak, you will not get to your desired goal in ranking your website business on the highly sought after, Page 1.
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