What are On Page SEO and Off Page SEO?

Search engine optimization is the term used to describe a set of processes that aim in optimizing a website for search engines. SEO is important not only for getting high quality visitors but it is also a way to increase the credibility of a website and to expand brand awareness.

Search engines are using complex algorithms to determine which pages to include in their index and the order they show these pages in the search results. SEO is the way to ‘speak’ to search engines in a language they can understand and provide them with more details about a website.

SEO has two major components, On Page and off page SEO.

On Page SEO: -

On Page SEO refers to settings you can apply on the website so that it is optimized for search engines. The most important on Page SEO Tips are:

• Optimized titles and descriptions
• Proper URL Structures
• User friendly navigation (user sitemaps)
• Optimized internal links
• Text formatting (use of h1, h2, bold etc)
•  Image optimization (image size, proper image names, use of ALT tag)
•  User friendly 404 pages
•  Fast loading pages
•  Google Authorship verification for all pages
•  Top quality fresh content (This is always the most important SEO factor!)
•  External links (no broken links or links to ‘bad’ sites)

Off Page SEO

Unlike On- page SEO, off-page SEO refers to activities outside the boundaries of the webpage. The most important are:

•         Link Building
•         Social Media
•         Social bookmarking

Why is Off-Page SEO important?

Search engines have been trying for decades to find a way to return the best results to the searcher. To do that, they take into account the on-site SEO factors (described above), some other quality factors and off-page SEO.

Off page SEO gives them a very good indication on how the World (other websites and users) perceive the particular website. A web site that is useful is more likely to have references (links) from other websites; it is more likely to have mentions on social media (Facebook likes, tweets, Pins, +1’s etc.) and it is more likely to be bookmarked and shared among communities of like-minded users.

What are the benefits of ‘off-site SEO’ to website owners?

A successful off-site SEO strategy will generate the following benefits to website owners:

Increase in rankings – The website will rank higher in the SERPs and this also means more traffic.

Increase in PageRank – Page rank is a number between 0 and 10 which indicates the importance of a website in the eyes of Google. It is the system invented by Larry Page (one of Google’s founders) and one of the reasons that Google was so successful in showing the most relevant results to the searcher.  Page rank today is only one out of the 250 factors that Google is using to rank websites.

More exposure – Higher rankings also means greater exposure because when a website ranks in the top positions: it gets more links, more visits and more social media mentions. It’s like a never ending sequence of events where one thing leads to another and then to another etc.

Link Building

Link building is the most popular off-Page SEO method.  Basically by building external links to your website, you are trying to gather as many ‘votes’ as you can so that you can bypass your competitors and rank higher. For example if someone likes this article and references it from his/her website or blog, then this is like telling search engines that this page has good information.

Over the years webmasters were trying to build links to their websites so that they rank higher and they ‘invented’ a number of ways to increase link count. The most popular ways were: -

Blog Directories – something like yellow pages but each entry was a link back to a website.

Forum Signatures – Many people where commenting on forums for the sole purpose of getting a link back to their website (they included the links in their signature).

Article Directories – By publishing your articles on an article directory you could get a link (or 2) back to your website. Some article directories accepted only unique content while other directories accepted anything from spin articles to already published articles.

Shared Content Directories – Websites like hubpages and infobarrel allowed you to publish content and in return you could add a couple of links pointing to your websites.

Link exchange schemes – Instead of trying to publish content you could get in touch with other webmasters and exchange links. In other words I could link your website from mine and you could do the same. In some cases you could even do more complicated exchanges by doing a 3-way link, in other words I link to your website from my website but you link to my website from a different website.

SocialMedia

Social media is part of ‘off-site SEO’ and if you think about it, it’s also a form of link building. It should be noted that almost all of the links you get from social media sites are “nofollow” but this does not mean that they do not have any value.

Social Media mentions are gaining ground as ranking factors and proper configuration of social media profilescan also boost SEO.

SocialBookmarking

Social bookmarking is not as popular as it used to be in the past but it is still a good way to get traffic to your website. 

Conclusion

Off-page SEO is as important as on-site SEO. If you want your SEO campaigns to be successful you have to do both. When thinking about link building doesn’t take the easy way, but try to get links from hard-to-get places. The more difficult is to get a link, the more value it has.

In the past you could easily get thousands of links and rank higher but nowadays you have to do more than that.  My advice is to forget about link building all together and put all your efforts in making a great website, promote it correctly and everything else will follow.