March 14th, 2010 by Nick

On-page and off-page SEO are essential dual strategies for improving the status of your website in the search engine results pages. While on-page search engine optimization is sometimes sacrificed at the expense of the other because off-page search engine optimization yields results in less time, it is better to regard them as equally important in the short and long term success of your website.

Before examining on-page and off-page SEO in greater details, let’s have a look at the generally accepted definitions of both.

Definitions

On-page SEO refers to the on-page optimisation of the pages that make up a website. This work is usually focused on the keywords that make up the copy, or the content, on the web pages. This also refers to technical aspects such as site validation, meta tags and fixing any broken links or sitemaps.

Off-page SEO refers to the optimisation off the pages of the website. Amongst other things this includes maximising links that come off the pages so that they encourage higher placing in search engine results, and other link building strategies.

Why are they both important?

Search engines locate websites because they are drawn to their keyword-rich content. They are also drawn to websites by the amount of incoming links to that site – the existence of these incoming links depend on your website being well-regarded by others. And what does this regard usually depend on, but the quality of your on-page content.

You could almost argue that if you had to choose just one, that on-page search engine optimization is more important. Good on-page SEO gives both search engine spiders and human users the information they are looking for, meaning better results and greater traffic. In the long-term it sets up your site as an attractive option for other sites to link to, thus creating the basis for good off-page SEO. However it is by no means the full picture.

But why choose just one approach? Good SEO depends on a holistic treatment which utilises all search engine optimization tools available, so incorporating on-page and off-page SEO really is key.

Tips to improve your on-page SEO

Content is king; make sure your keywords are well-chosen after selective and careful research. Use keywords in title tags, meta tags and headings. There is a fine line between too few and too many keywords – go for five to seven for every five hundred words.

Think about the structure of your site because search engine spiders love site maps and internal linking – it makes your site more attractive to them and therefore yields better results – but the ease and usability of your site also appeals to human users. Check and eliminate broken links for the same reason.

Tips to improve your off-page SEO

Links are key with off-page SEO. Use keywords from a large list in links (as with on-page SEO, ensure the keywords are chosen after research, testing and selection), in link-ads (which you should track) and near inbound links.

Linking to other sites is important too. Link exchange was the most popular of linking to other sites, but this trick has fallen out of favour with SEO link building due to the search engines frowning on it. Now the key is to try and get one-way inbound links, preferably from high-ranking publisher sites. Linking to sites such as these immediately boost your site’s ranking by positive association, so while they are hard to come by it is worth trying to make these relationships.

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