What’s the Difference Between On Page and Off Page SEO
One of the best ways to increase your business’ online visibility is through using search engine optimization (SEO) best practices. SEO is the process used to improve your website’s ranking on search engine results pages. Even if you’ve never heard of SEO, you’re probably already implementing a few promising strategies. To get the most out of your efforts and increase your ranking, it’s important to implement both On Page SEO and Off Page SEO (also referred to as offsite or off-site SEO). These strategies involve different tactics, but both of them aim to increase your website’s ranking, gain more traffic, and lead to more conversions. In this article, we’ll explore the main differences between On Page SEO and Off Page SEO and how to start using both to your advantage.
What is On Page SEO?
On Page SEO includes all of the search engine optimizations techniques that you can do yourself, to your own website. They’re the things you have control over—things you can consciously decide to do, or not to do. Generally speaking, On Page SEO covers everything that your website, and each individual webpage, is about—it’s descriptive and relevant. It let’s people know what you do, what you’re an expert in, and what you have to say about your niche.
On Page SEO is used to optimize your website and each of its moving parts to positively affect your search engine rankings. On Page SEO also helps recognize competitive keywords your website can rank for.
To better understand all of the moving parts of On Page SEO, let’s look at some of the most widely used tactics.
Website Page Content
Any content that you add to your website needs to be relevant, useful, and accurate for your readers. If it’s not high quality content, it’s not going to help your SEO efforts. Make sure things are easy to digest and add value to your reader’s experience.
Keywords
When creating new content, try to do so with keyword optimization in mind. It’s not as heavily weighed as it used to be, but it’s still important. Use a combination of short-tail and long-tail keywords that rank competitively and never over-stuff your pages.
Title Tags
Title tags are the things that tell search engines what your web pages title is. It’s prominently displayed on all search engine results pages when your website comes up. Title tags are the hyperlinks you click on to visit a web page after making a search. Include your target keywords and try to create search engine friendly title tags.
Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are the small paragraph that appears underneath your title tag on a given search query. It’s the short description that let’s people know exactly what the content of the corresponding page will be. Use relevant keywords and try to be as straightforward as possible with your meta descriptions. 
Internal Linking
Another good way to boost On Page SEO is to internally link your web pages together. This is not only useful to visitors; it boosts overall user experience. User experience plays a huge role in your website’s ranking and Google and other search engines will notice anything you do to improve it.
Page Performance
How fast your page loads makes a huge difference in search engine rankings. More often than not, if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load, people will leave—and Google will take notice. Run tests to ensure that everything is as fast as possible and if you can’t seem to beat 3 seconds, consider switching your hosting platform or optimizing your page’s speed using tried and true tactics.
What is Off Page SEO?
Off Page SEO is a little more complicated. It encompasses everything that happens to your website rather than on it—things that happen off of your actual site. When your company, website, or brand is shown on other websites, that’s Off Page SEO. When an influencer decides to link back to a helpful article you wrote, that’s Off Page SEO. It’s not as clear cut as On Page SEO, but it revolves around making your website more authoritative. To clarify, let’s look at a few examples of popular Off Page SEO tactics.
Backlinks
The most important Off Page SEO tactic is building strong backlinks. The more you have, the better your site will rank. There are a lot of paid backlink building approaches, but those are risky and can seriously damage your ranking. Instead, focus on organic approaches and continue to create high quality content that deserves to be shared. Try guest blogging on sites within your niche, reaching out to influencers, using other page’s broken links for your benefit, and getting involved in business directories the right way.
Domain Authority
Search engines assign a number for your domain authority, which basically describes how strong your website is. The more authority you have, the better you rank. This is measured by the length of time your website has been up and running, how many backlinks you have, and how many technical problems your site runs into. Try to keep your authority as high as possible by using a stable domain name, generating good content, and making sure your page is running without any problems.
Social Promotion
Another way you can work on your Off Page SEO is through social media. Sharing your website or web page on your social media profiles can lead to more website visits, more shares, and eventually more backlinks. It’s also a great way to connect with your audience and strengthen your brand.
How to Maximize Your SEO Strategies
We get a lot of questions asking which type of SEO is better, On Page or Off Page. It’s a difficult question because the simple answer is always that it depends. It depends on your website status, your audience, your expertise, and even your niche. Both On Page SEO and Off Page SEO have extremely important factors and both play a huge role in the algorithm Google uses to rank a website. 
Instead of focusing your energy on how to cut corners and get the best results with the least effort, you should prioritize both on your website. This way, you will work on bettering your website as a whole and simultaneously reap the benefits by rising in the rankings.
With that being said, there are a few instances when you should put more of an emphasis on one tactic over the other.
New Website Launch
If you’re new to the website game, you’ll need to build up your content before you can start to get legitimate backlinks. With no content, people aren’t ever going to link to your site. If you don’t add content that will never change. In this situation, you need to focus your efforts on building up your On Page SEO and overall content. Once you start developing content that carries value, people will take notice. Once people take notice, you’ll start to earn natural backlinks and people will be more likely to link your website if asked.
Another benefit of prioritizing content and On Page SEO with a new website launch is that you have a chance to build strong keywords from the beginning. Keywords are what Google uses to connect search queries with your website and are very important when it comes to indexing your site. Choose your keywords wisely and use them strategically to get the best results. Continue developing strong content and always double-check your information for accuracy and relevancy. Publishing low quality content will have an adverse effect on your efforts, so put in the time needed to make sure it’s high quality and targeted towards your audience.
Seamless Websites With Strong Content
If you’ve had your website for a while, are producing strong content, and rarely, if ever, experience performance issues, then you should focus more on Off Page SEO. Be advised, when we say strong content we mean it—you need long, unique posts that go into depth about a specific topic to rank well. When you produce content that can be found anywhere, why would someone choose your website over the others for a backlink? Chances are, they wouldn’t.
Once you are producing high quality content, you can reach out to experts and share your information with them. If they like it, they’ll probably use it. If not, hopefully someone else will. The more authoritative the websites are that are giving you backlinks, the better your results will be. You can also use directories and guest posting websites, but they won’t be as strong as backlinks that are truly earned.
At the end of the day, SEO is an important tactic to implement as a whole. To see the best results, you need both On Page SEO and Off Page SEO. However, SEO can be tough and determining where to focus your efforts can get overwhelming. If you need help, or want to see if your SEO efforts have been paid off, get in contact with us today. SEO Fuel Marketing is always happy to help with any or all of your digital marketing needs.
