Blending On-Page and Off-Page SEO Efforts

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.