What the heck is the difference between on-page and off-page SEO? Thing is, it’s kinda easy to see the difference because on-page SEO is basically what you do on your own site to improve rankings whereas off-page SEO is what you do on other sites to improve your search engine rankings. This post tackles the issue of basic and in-depth on-page SEO. You’ll get to know what WordPress plugins, software and on-line services you may want to use. Other than that, you’ll get a general idea of what off-page SEO is. Plus you’ll learn what off-page SEO methods work nowadays. Now let’s take a closer look at each of them.
What is On-Page SEO
Like I said before, on-page SEO is what you do on your own site to improve your search engine rankings. Now you’ll learn what exactly that means. On-page SEO falls into two main categories: basic on-page SEO and in-depth on-page SEO.
Basic On-Page SEO
Basic on-page SEO implies that you use your keyword in:
- URL
- Title
- Headline
- Page Copy
- Image Alt Tag
- Meta Data
In case you’re using the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin, you’ll be able to use it for keeping track of your keyword usage. You can just scroll down once in your post editor and you’ll see all the requirements that you need to keep in mind for proper on-page SEO for every single WordPress post you create.
In-Depth On-Page SEO
In-depth on-page SEO deals with things like making sure that you don’t have broken links, the title and meta data issue, your URL structure is proper, you don’t have too heavy images, etc. You can install the Broken Link Checker plugin to take care of broken links and images within your site. You may want to use other software or services to get to know about your in-depth on-page SEO issues. I personally used ScreamingFrog and Moz.com for that sort of info.
Now, let me get you up to speed about off-page SEO.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO is all about building links that point back to your site (aka backlinks).
As a matter of fact, there are a lot of off-page SEO methods. They are generally called link building because you kind of build backlinks for your site. Here are the off page SEO methods that seem to be working best right now:
- Blog Commenting
- Web 2.0 Properties
- Forum posting
- Guest posting
Note: once SEOs start overusing an off-page SEO method and Google devalues some sort of links, another workable method appears. It’s basically a never-ending game. Sort of SEO hide-and-seek for lack of a better word.
Conclusion
Though you need to both make sure that your site is good both in terms of on-page and off-page SEO, a good (Google?) rule of thumb would be to focus on off-page SEO. More specifically on the quality and quantity of backlinks. At least that’s how it’s working at the time of the writing. You can find a whole lot of mediocre sites on Google that rank pretty high because they have a slew of backlinks. It’s just how the cookie crumbles …
Though it’s a pretty controversial thing, could you possibly add more items to the list of SEO methods that work for your nowadays?
