“On Page” and “Off Page” SEO – The Difference

In this article, we will address the difference between these 2 terms. Getting both ‘On Page’ and ‘Off Page’ SEO properly optimised will deliver excellent result to your site ranking.

Here’s the difference:

On Page SEO Optimization

The term ‘On Page’ is referring to website optimization which is done on the pages of your websites.

How? It’s simple.

This can be done by optimizing your keywords, article contents, designs, title tags and description. Relevancy is very important here. After you’ve decided the content and nature of your website, you have to arrange those elements I‘ve just mentioned correctly on your web page.

At the main page, it is always recommended to place your primary keywords or main phrases that you are targeting. Another good practice is to place ‘header tags’ such as h1- h7 in most article post or pages to emphasize on key points. And on these heading tags, you must place the important phrases to grab search engines’ attention. The use of italicized or bolded keywords in the meta tags may help to strengthen the critical phrases you wish to rank well.

Should you use images inside your site, make sure you insert the ‘img alt’ tags which contain the main keyword phrases. The use of image tag will inform site visitors about the image when the website is used in non-compatible browsers.

The use of file names and folders inside your website are also crawled by search engine robots. The added advantage of using keyword rich folder names and file names will greatly assist search engines to index your website for those particular key phrases.

On-Page SEO Checklist

• Always start with keyword selection, research and testing
• Meta Description tag
• ALT tags
• H1 tags
• URL structure
• Internal linking strategy
• Content
• Keyword density
• Site maps, both XML and user facing
• Usability and accessibility
• Track target keywords
• Expect results in 6-12 months

Avoid common on-page SEO mistakes such as:

• Duplicate content
• URL variants of the same pages
• Off-site images and content on-site
• Duplicate title tags

Off Page Search Engine Marketing

Finally, the term “Off Page” indicates optimizing your web page outside of your web pages element. Link building is exactly an off page SEO option.

One of the most common ‘off page’ SEO method is to write great content articles and submit them to articles websites with back links to your own sites. Another method is to participate in social networking sites e.g. Facebook and place your own web link. In addition, you can also consider posting your own website profile links or signature to forums.

Off-Page SEO Checklist

• Always start with keyword research, testing and selection
• Use Keywords in link anchor text
• Obtain links from high ranking publisher sites
• One-way inbound links (not link exchange or reciprocal links)
• Different keywords in your link-ads from the same site
• Gradual link building technology (no growth spikes)
• Use relevant keywords near your inbound link (contextual relevance)
• Deep linking (from multiple pages to multiple pages)
• Target a large list of keywords (5-500+)
• Link from sites with a variety of LinkRanks
• Track active all keywords and refine strategy as required
• Discontinue campaigns if ranking does not improve
• Expect results in 1-2 months (Bing) 1-9 months (Google, Yahoo)

Avoid common off-page SEO mistakes:

• Duplicate keywords in link avderts
• Site-wide links causing link growth spikes
• Using on-page SEOs to do the work of specialist off-page SEO’s
• Placing random links without keywords near your link adverts

Feel free to browse other useful articles included inside the Savvy section.