On-page and Off-Page SEO: What are the Differences?

Website search engine optimization techniques and strategies can be separated into two categories. While the first one, “on-page SEO,” examines the subject content of your site pages, the second one, “off-page SEO,” determines the extent of your website’s authoritative and popular reach. This means that your on-page content decides for what your site ranks, and your off-page factors determine how high you place in SERPs.

The primary differences between On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO include the following:

On-Page SEO

When you optimize the different types of content on your website, each of which affects your SEO rankings, you are performing on-page (on-site) SEO. You are in control of all of these content factors and can make changes whenever you like. The most important of these content areas include the following factors:

• Title Tags. For best SEO results, place your targeted keywords for your website in the title tag for each page.

• Headings (H1). In general, headings appear in the largest font size of all the text on your web pages. This gives them slightly more value with search engines than your other textual content. Being careful to use keywords in agreement with your page content, it is a good SEO practice to include your target keywords in your page headings.

• URL Structure. When creating your URLs, include your major keywords when possible. It is not, however, a good idea to revise all of your existing URLs so that they will contain these keywords. Refrain from revising old URLs unless your plan is to redirect them to your new URLs. For this, you should consult a professional web designer or SEO expert.

• Alt Text for Images. The use of any good content management system (CMS) should enable you to add alt text to your website images. Although it is not visible to most site visitors, this text is available to screen reader software to assist blind web users in understanding your image content. Search engines also crawl these images to evaluate your site content. For both of these reasons, you should include some targeted keywords in your image descriptions.

• Page Loading Speed. When you optimize your website pages to load fast, you can improve your site’s rank in SERPs. Google and other major search engines strive to enable web users to locate the subjects of their searches as rapidly as possible for top quality user experience.

• Page Content. Make sure that your web page content is easy to read and offers value to the reader. To be successful and rank well for on-site SEO, your website’s pages must be useful to web users.

• Internal Linking. Placing internal links to other pages and content on your site is helpful to your visitors and to search engines. Quality on-page SEO will enable your website content to be fully read by both site users and by search engine robots for indexing purposes. When your site content is easy to navigate, understand and evaluate, your search engine ranking can improve significantly.

Off-Page SEO

The main focus of off-page SEO is on improving your domain’s authority by getting backlinks from other domains. You can increase your backlinks by ensuring that all of your site content is of outstanding quality and value to viewers. By generating social media shares of your site content and sending outreach emails to your industry niche influencers, you can gain strong, valuable backlinks. You can also add posts to other sites in your industry by guest blogging on these sites and including links to your web pages in your blogs.

SEO experts advise that link quality is more important and helpful to your site’s SEO than link quantity. Although it is important to focus on achieving excellent on-page SEO first, before working on acquiring better off-page SEO, both play a major role in increasing your search engine ranking for top placement in SERPs.