Successful search engine optimization utilizes a blend of both on-page and off-page SEO efforts. It is the marriage of these two techniques that produce long-term, sustainable results and page one ranking in search.
Website owners – including myself – tend to get caught up with only one technique. They focus entirely on on-page SEO and forget about off-page SEO or vice versa. In real-world application, you really need both to rank in search. This is especially true if you are competing at a national or international level, where competition is stiff and on-line content plentiful.
Today I’d like to explore both on-page and off-page SEO, so you can get a better understand of both techniques and learn how you can use these to improve your search engine ranking and drive more organic SEO traffic to your website or blog.
What is On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO is optimization that takes place inside your website. It includes things like focused keyword, content quality, H1 headers, keyword density, and meta titles and descriptions. These are only a sampling, but enough to give you a flavor of what on-page SEO is and reinforce the fact that it is something you do within your website software such as WordPress.
I recently gave the iThemes community a webinar that discussed on-page SEO. The presentation slides and video are listed below for you to review and digest.
If you reviewed the slides or listened to the webinar replay, you’ll see there is a lot you can do on-page to influence your search engine ranking and drive more traffic.
Now that we have a better since of on-page SEO, let’s dive into off-page SEO.
What is Off-Page SEO?
Really powerful SEO expands well outside the website. It includes a variety of SEO efforts that cover areas that help search engines understand the who, why and what of you. In particular, off-page SEO is focused on building the perception of your website or blog by demonstrating quality, authority, and trust.
Search engines have been trying for decades to find a way to return the best results for a given search phrase. To do that, they take into account the on-site SEO and off-page SEO factors. There are well over 200 in all and while we won’t go into all 200, I do want to make sure you understand the most important ones.
Off-page SEO factors are important because these data points give search engines a better indication of how the world perceives your website or blog. A website that is useful is more likely to have a number of external data points that are created by users outside of the website owner.
I followed up my on-page SEO webinar with one dedicated of off-page SEO. The iThemes webinar slides and video are presented below for you to review.
If you listened to the off-page SEO webinar, you might be a little nervous about diving in. While I didn’t want to scare you away from off-page SEO, I did want to educate you and protect you against yourself or an outside SEO consultant. Off-page SEO is important and it needs to managed to obtain strong search engine ranking. That said, it can also be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing. Thus my words of caution.
Why Blending On-Page and Off-Page SEO is Critical
On-page SEO helps establish the SEO foundation for your website or blog. Off-page SEO follows those efforts by validating your reputation within the internet world.
You have to have a balance of both to prove that you have quality content and that the world cares about this content. Once you demonstrate your authority via off-page SEO, your on-page SEO efforts feel much more natural and they provide much greater results.
Want to Improve Your SEO?
There are a two main routes you can take to improve your efforts with local search optimization. You can hire a professional consultant or you can learn SEO and perform your own optimization.
If you’d like to hire a professional, we’d be happy to help. You can learn more about our SEO consulting services and then reach out if you feel we are a fit.
If you’d like to go the DIY SEO route, we have a great course waiting for you. Our online SEO course is a perfect fit for bloggers, small business owners, and experienced marketers. Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been working with marketing for years, you’ll find this course helpful. You’ll learn what SEO is and how you can create an actionable plan for search engine optimization. The course will help you build a solid SEO foundation for your website or blog, then follow this up with a well structured on-going SEO tasks like link building and social media sharing.
View the course material and outline ->
Purchase the course and learn SEO->
Enjoyed your webinars, Rebecca! It really is crucial to work on both aspects of SEO and combine them. People should be aware that good rankings don’t come over night and don’t get discouraged if you don’t see improvements right away.
Nice article, I also would like to add in addition to the on-page and off-page SEO points mentioned above, it’s also important to get real engaging visitors to your site because Google uses engagement metrics these days in addition to page data, backlinks and social signals.
Hi Rebecca, I also get caught up in onsite seo and neglecting the offsite work. This is probably because onsite seo is more easy to do maybe? I Found the best blend of onsite seo and offiste seo is to write sharable blog posts and spend a day looking for trustworthy sites to promote it on.
Hi Rebecca,
Nice article for those who want to learn SEO, you define on-page and off-page in a way that beginners can easily pick up these points. I must say in today’s SEO content is most important factor to rank so put unique and quality content on your site for better result.
Thank for sharing your knowledge with us.
Great post, I really enjoyed reading it!
One thing that’s been working really well for me recently is blog commenting. As you mentioned in the post, it’s really important to do it properly by focusing on the value add rather than the pure SEO benefit. One thing it’s important to remember though is that the benefits stretch beyond pure SEO, in that a “bank” of high quality comments can start to drive a fairly decent amount of targeted referral traffic too which can drive sales on it’s own!