On-page Vs Off-page SEO: Complete Guide

On-page Vs Off-page SEO

Nowadays, people expect to find any information they need right at the top of their Google search results. It is much, much easier to attract new customers to your business if your website appears at the top of the search engine results page. The best investment you can make for your business is a solid search engine optimization strategy.

In general, effective SEO strategies fall into two categories: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

• The term on-page SEO refers to a variety of SEO factors and techniques that describe how you optimize certain elements of your website.

• Off-page SEO focuses on marketing your site or brand outside of your website.

On-page SEO is the practice of building websites that appeal to users and, therefore, search engines, while off-page SEO is the practice of getting exposure for a website while establishing trust and authority.

On-Page SEO Factors

On-page SEO means everything you do on your site to improve its ranking in search engines. On-page SEO includes most of the "basics" of search engine optimization, such as keywords, HTML tags, page titles, and mobile compatibility. 

The purpose of this part of SEO is to ensure that your website's content is crawlable, indexed, and understandable by search engines. SEO is much more than that, however.

In addition to ranking your website higher, on-page SEO includes techniques that improve the user experience. A large part of on-page SEO is also making your site friendly for humans to navigate, as search engines like Google want to recommend the most useful sites.

Here are the factors that can impact on-page SEO:

Content

If your on-page content isn't good, then no one will be interested in your site. Approach it from the standpoint that "content is king." You can optimize around keywords, descriptions, and internal linking, but if your on-page content isn't good, no one will visit it.

Keywords

Keyword optimization is still a cornerstone of SEO today, even though keywords are less important than they were a few years ago. However, today's searchers prefer longer-tail keywords, and this has shifted the focus toward long-tail keywords. Create and optimize your website content around your audience and the keywords they search for. You can use ETTVI’s Keyword Suggestion Tools to find high quality keywords for your content.

Title Tags

A title tag refers to the heading of a web page that appears on the search engine results page, which is the second-most important factor after on-page content. Titles should be 65 characters or less (choose your words carefully!)

Meta Description

Meta descriptions appear below URLs in search engine results and below headlines in social media posts. It not only describes the content on that page but it is also written to help your website rank better in search engine results. If you want your entire description to appear in search results, keep the description under 155 characters.

Bonus Tool: Meta Tags are a very important part of SEO as they provide relevant information about your page to Google. You can use the Meta Tags Generator and Meta Tags Analyzer tool to maximize your SEO efforts.

Alt Text

The alt text on a picture file allows search engines to understand what a picture file is since they cannot see images (they can only see text). In other words, if you post a graphic that illustrates some injection molding tips in your blog, you can save the alt text for that graphic as "automotive-injection-molding-tips" and that picture will start to appear in the search results for the phrase.

Internal Linking

Another important factor of on-page SEO is linking to related pages on your website internally. It's easy for search engines to crawl everything on your site when you link to different relevant pages, and it's also easier to keep visitors engaged.

Example: 

Check ETTVI’s Crawlability Checker Tool to check whether your page is crawlable or not.

Page Speed

As part of on-page SEO, page speed (or load time) is an important Google Ranking factor - Google tends to rank faster pages higher than slower ones, and optimizing page speed can also help you rank higher in Google's search engine results. You can improve the speed of a page in many ways, but you should start with images, JavaScript files, caching, and compression. ‍

Bonus Tool: ETTVI’s Website Speed Checker tool allow you to check loading speed time of any website in seconds. 

Mobile Friendliness

The mobile friendliness of a website is measured based on how well the website works when viewed and used on a mobile device. Mobile-friendly pages can adjust to fit on any device's screen while still allowing people to navigate the page effectively. Moreover, they prioritize the mobile user experience by making the navigation easy and the page speed fast as well as responsive design.

Navigation

Navigation in on-page SEO refers to ensuring that all users can see and access content on a web page. The terms "site structure" and "grouping" do not apply here. Search engine Google is very concerned about what kind of website it recommends to users and makes sure that any recommendations they make are accessible to anyone, regardless of their disability or browser.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals was launched in the spring of 2020 in order to determine a website's page performance as well as its user experience. It provides insight into a website's performance and identifies areas for improvement.

Every Core Web Metric refers to a specific part of user experience and shows the real-world experiences of visitors to your site. Three aspects are being covered by the set: interactivity, loading, and visual stability.

Off-Page SEO Factors

Off-page SEO refers to strategies, tactics, and actions you take to promote your content across third-party websites. The goal of this part of SEO is to get your site, company, and/or brand mentioned on another website.

Normally, off-page SEO is discussed in the context of building links to a website. There's no doubt that backlinks are important, and we're going to discuss them in greater detail below, but off-page SEO goes much deeper than just links.

Backlinks

Off-page SEO is still heavily influenced by backlink quality and quantity. The importance of backlinks is so great that Google has made more than one algorithm update to combat link schemes and spam. Off-page SEO is important because links provide your site with "link juice," which makes it appear more credible and authoritative to search engines.

Domain Authority

Typically measured on a scale of 1-100, domain authority represents the value of your website to search engines. It is essentially an assessment of the quality of your website. Websites with a high domain authority are more likely to rank higher in search results than those with low domain authority.

Several factors determine domain authority, including the number of backlinks, the length of time the domain name has been registered, and the number of 404 pages. You can increase your domain authority and rank by ensuring your website follows SEO best practices. To check the domain authority of the site, you need a DA PA Checker Tool.

Social Media

Social media channels are still a vital way to promote your site online, even though they don't directly affect a page's ranking. People can find and interact with your company through social media, and it allows you to reach new and existing customers. You can control your brand SERP by consistently posting to the major social media platforms, since Google indexes pages on these sites.

Unlinked Mentions

 In unlinked mentions, your company name or website is mentioned online without a link back to your website. There is a very low probability of your site or brand being linked to every time your brand or site is mentioned online. If that were the case, Google would probably penalize your site for that. But that does not mean that unlinked brand mentions have no value for off-page SEO. Still, they can provide authority and trust to your site. In addition, mentions are a great way to build new backlinks.

Google My Business

Business owners can easily and simply provide information to Google about their business through Google My Business (GMB). The information includes the business type, location, business hours, and contact information. GMB also populates results for local searches and Google Maps. It's a key off-page SEO factor for any local business that depends on traffic from one particular area. You can set up your business’s GMB listing and take benefit from this local SEO technique.

‍Is On-Page or Off-Page SEO More Important?

On-page vs. off-page SEO isn't a choice, it's like choosing between a roof and a foundation for a house. To improve your ranking, on-page and off-page SEO techniques work together.

SEOs, however, generally advise focusing more on off-page SEO before things go too far on the on-page front.

Just as when building a house, you should lay the foundation before building the rest.  You may need to come back and perform some maintenance on your on-page SEO from time to time, just like you would with a foundation. By balancing the two, you will be able to make your website "bilingual" so that both your users and the search engine robots can understand if- that's how you rise in the rankings.