Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art and science of getting your website higher up in search results for your target keywords. The activity in SEO can be roughly divided between onsite and offsite. Onsite and offsite SEO, often known as onpage and offpage SEO, are the two main components of the SEO process. For maximum exposure to the search engine results and for higher rankings, you need to understand the difference between the two and how to utilize them better. Revved Business is here to help—we’re happy to share our insight to help you better understand SEO.
Understanding SEO
SEO involves making your website as attractive as possible to search engines such as Google. The ultimate goal is to appear higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Typically business websites aim to appear high for a certain set of keywords, based on what they think potential visitors will be searching for. Now, let’s breakdown the difference between onsite and offsite SEO.
Onsite SEO
Onsite SEO is usually the first place to start in terms of creating a comprehensive audit of a website, creating a solid foundation for other techniques to build upon. This is very straightforward and mostly centers on keyword targeting and content building, however it can create drastic changes in a site’s rankings and traffic.
Onpage SEO begins with determining what keywords are appropriate for a site, researching each word’s search volume, and then deciding what keywords will be targeting on each page of the site. Implementing focused keywords is one of the easiest and most effective SEO tactics when it comes to rankings and traffic. Content creation can be an amazing tool in terms of improving a site’s on-site SEO and is an easy way to seamlessly implement more high volume keywords into pages. Adding a blog to a site can also be a very beneficial content creation strategy, as it creates a new platform to incorporate more keywords and cover more information. Other factors to optimize while doing on-site work are page titles, meta descriptions, image tags, and URLs for each page.
All of these edits are simple and easy to execute, but are essential to the initial SEO of a site. There isn’t much else to be done on-site after all of these tasks have been completed. However, it is always a good idea to revisit your onsite SEO work later on down the road and reevaluate keyword choices, add more body copy or pages, etc. to help keep a site fresh or as an effort to help a struggling site.
Offsite SEO
Offsite SEO is a little more complex and is an ongoing job. The main tasks of offsite SEO are link and citation building. Search engines base the credibility of a site on how many other sites link to it. This is under the assumption that if a lot of other sites want to link to a specific site it must have good quality content. This is where off-site SEO comes into play and creates the task of finding high quality backlinks for a site.
One major way to make a site appear more credible and to help in rankings is to find local links. For example, an HVAC contractor in San Antonio, Texas would benefit greatly from local businesses linking to them. Local link building is a tactic that works to show search engines exactly where a business is located. This helps to increase local search rankings. One way to go about finding local links is to take a peek at local competitors’ backlinks. Then using this information to submit to quality local sites. This not only aids in gaining links, but also helps level out the playing field between the site and its competitors.
Citation building is very similar to local link building; however the target is gaining a link on a credible directory. Directories provide information on a wider scale, meaning they are not a localized resource. There are a number of high quality directories that are free and easy to submit to that can easily bump up a site’s visibility. Finding these directories can be a little tricky, but again looking at competitors’ backlinks is a great place to start.
Learn More about Onsite SEO & Offsite SEO
Both onsite and offsite SEO are very important to your business’ website. Your first concern is to get your onsite SEO correct so that search engines can understand your content. Then, when you have enough quality content published on your website you can start thinking about offpage SEO. You can also get strong natural links from other websites that will further boost your rankings. To learn more, feel free to reach out to our team at Revved Business.
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