SEO For Marketers: How On and Off-Page Optimization Works
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s a marketer, you’re maybe familiar with the term Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
SEO is the term of various strategies you might set to get your website found quickly in search engine results. While search engines such as Google don’t just release their exact techniques for page rankings, we understand enough about their plans to make a difference.
Two areas that are more important for marketers to understand are on-page and off-page optimization techniques. An SEO strategy looks to methods that happen both on and off your website to increase your rankings.
Here’s what you need to know:
On and off-page optimization definition
First, whats on-page and off-page SEO means:
On-page SEO describes any techniques you can use directly on your web page to better search ranking. For example, building SEO-optimised content or using the correct header and meta descriptions falls under on-page SEO.
Off-page SEO relates to all the SEO techniques that happen outside the website. For example, social signals and backlinks are off-page SEO strategies.
On-page and off-page techniques are equally as crucial for optimizing your website. Some methods are easy enough to implement immediately, while others take time to put in place.
Google ranking factors
Search engine companies like google don’t practice releasing their exact methodologies. But, if you pay attention, they give some clear answers from time to time. For example, Recently, Google released a new SEO Starter Guide, and occasionally they put out informational videos.
Besides learning what we can straight from the source, several SEO experts regularly test out their ideas to see what will impact rankings. Brian Dean has an outstanding reputation, and his list of 200 ranking factors is kept periodically updated as Google makes changes.
One thing important to realize about SEO is that it does change. Five years ago is not as effective today in optimizing your website significantly as Google changes its algorithm. For example, a few years ago, many websites would game the system by stuffing keywords onto their purchasing and pages low-quality backlinks from “link farms.”
To enhance the quality of the search results, Google improved its algorithms so that sites employing those techniques would be penalized rather than receive benefits. You need to aim the weed out any “black hat” SEO methods instead of forcing website owners to ensure the sites meet quality standards.
This is why marketers need to understand SEO and the factors that they can influence. There is still some questionable advice going around that is best avoided. Instead, you don’t want to put your website in a position where it may be penalized in search rankings.
On-page optimization examples
Here are the examples of on-page SEO optimization:
Improve site speed
How does the site speed affect SEO? Mainly because it impacts the user experience of your website. Where a visitor visits your site and takes longer to load, they’ll often give up in disappointment. This gives a signal to Google that your site is not an exceptional result for visitors, especially if they leave quickly.
Many things can affect site speed, including who you host your website with, but some can be remedied on-site. For example, your images should be optimized for the web. The file size should be as small as possible so that the image loads quickly.
Other factors can include poorly coded plug-ins (software tools that give your website certain functions), pop-ups, and overall, cumbersome site coding. These are issues that are all fixable.
Improve page content
Google tries to send visitors to valuable pages. Therefore your content page needs to be of high quality. User behavior gives signals to Google about the quality of content.
For example, if the site ranks in organic gardening tips, someone who searched for that term and clicked on your site expects to find helpful information. If they get something irrelevant (like the inorganic gardening tips) or don’t get beneficial information, they will click away.
It will help if you always intended for your page content to be valuable and relevant. It includes looking at how you format the content for easy consumption to help visitors to stick around. They should understand quickly what your page is about and should be able to read it, avoiding large walls of text easily.
It also helps if you considered the keywords that you are trying to rank for and quality content to match, build relevance. There is no sense if you are trying to rank for keywords to get traffic – if you want the keywords to make sense for what you offer and what you are likely to search in your target market.
HTML tags
HTML tags tend to be out of mind and out of sight, so it is often missed. These are the descriptors and site tags that visitors don’t see, but they are detected in search engines. HTML tags help search engines better understand what your site is about, so here are the great places for your target keywords.
Here are some areas for HTML tags:
- Alt text on images: This will helps the search engine understand what an image is and rank your pictures in Google images.
- Header tags: These will help to organize the pages into subsections or sections. For example, this subsection uses an h3 label.
- Meta description: This is the description that you see below the URL in search engine results pages.
- Title tag: This page (or h1) title. This always includes keywords that reflect what the page is about.
Off-page optimization techniques
While on-page SEO centers primarily around content to bring traffic to your website, off-page SEO focuses on techniques to increase domain authority. Moz’s domain authority is a measure to predicts how a website will rank in search engine results. Every website is scored between one and one hundred, with one hundred doing the best.
Here’s what they say:
“Generally speaking, sites with a huge number of high-quality external links (such as Google.com or Wikipedia) are the top end of the Domain Authority scale, where is the small websites and businesses with fewer inbound links that have a much lower DA score. Brand-new websites always start with a Domain Authority score of one.”
You can gather from this because the most important off-page SEO part is the quality and number of backlinks in your website. It means that your off-page activities need to focus on how you get those backlinks.
A year ago, those dicey link farms we discussed earlier sprang up, offering a service to get backlinks in the websites. The problem is that those backlinks were generally of low quality and often utterly irrelevant for the website to question. This strategy will not help you – Google relevant backlinks, values quality.
It means that the quality over quantity strategy tends to work the best. Your on-page SEO with creating quality content interrelates with backlinks – you are likely to get more good links directly if you create engaging content.
Here are some ways to get a good backlink:
- Other bloggers Links to your blog like how we connected to Moz.
- Social media shares content that gets people linking to it.
- Guest blogging websites that are related to yours.
Final thoughts
On-page and off-page SEO techniques are working together to increase your search engine rankings on your website. But, if you start with one strategy, you would usually do what you can for on-page SEO.
Your site is more encourages those backlinks with your on-page SEO techniques sorted along with some quality content.
We are offering on and off-page SEO as part of our scope of work here at Astral Tech. Please check out our marketing packages or book a consultation here with us today.
