As an SEO agency, we sometimes forget that our lingo is foreign to most clients…it has the same deer-caught-in-headlights effect on them as when a car mechanic insists that a flux capacitor is broken.
However, one thing we know very well is that if our clients are going to be successful in the world of search engine optimization, then we need to focus on both onpage and offpage search engine optimization.
On this page we want to take a little look at both onpage and offpage SEO and talk about a few of the differences between them.
Firstly; onpage and offpage SEO are both about getting your website to the top of the searches as quickly as possible. The key difference between the two–and this is something that you will most likely be able to guess from the name–is the fact that onpage SEO actually takes place on your website, whereas offpage SEO is all about working with other websites by building links back to your site.
Let’s start with onpage as this is arguably the most important concept when it comes to search engine optimization. Onpage SEO involves analyzing and improving the code and content on your website to ensure the site properly communicates to the search engines just what your business is all about. This is incredibly important because if Google, Bing and Yahoo don’t know what the site is selling or promoting, how are they meant to rank you for terms related to your business or service?
Onpage SEO in a nutshell
- Meta Tags: The most important component of onpage SEO. This is where we ensure your HTML code is as good as it can be. It involves things like giving your pages, posts, and photos a ‘title’, ‘description’, and for some search engines ‘keywords’. The data that we put in your meta tags will most likely be displayed on the search engine results page so it needs to be informative as well as eye-catching.
- Indexing and Navigation: You want to make sure that as many pages on your site as possible can be discovered (aka ‘indexed’). After all; if a page can’t be discovered then it is likely that it can’t be ranked in the searches. Similarly, the navigation of your site should also flow and lead visitors to the page where they can learn about and purchase your product or service.
- Speed of your site: Slow loading websites tend to rank lower down in the searches. Getting them to go fast involves stuff like compressing images, code, using caching, and other geeky stuff. Trust us, it is important.
- Content: Content is the backbone of your search engine optimization efforts. This is where you will incorporate your keywords into your site contents, and it will be where you provide unique content that people will really want to share. Content can include text, images, and video. Whether you hire our SEO agency in Jacksonville or you want to do it yourself, we can’t stress enough just how important it is to have incredibly high quality content on your website. Poor quality content will completely eradicate any chances of success that you have when it comes to search engine dominance.
Offpage SEO in a nutshell
Got all that? Ok, this is the easy part…or so we think. Offpage SEO is all about building up relevant links to your site. As you may well know, the quality and relevance of the links that point back to your site, the higher your site will climb up the search results. As that happens, the more chance you have of making money. Everyone’s happy. There are plenty of different ways in which we can do inbound marketing via link building. Some approaches include being listed in local business directories, guest posting, social media, blog commenting, forum posts, and a whole lot more.
Done properly, SEO is a balancing act between onpage and offpage search engine optimization, but there are also areas like conversion optimization where we focus on how design elements (colors, wording, navigations, button placement, etc) improve the number of people who purchase your product or service.
There is so much more that can be said, but we’re sticking to our goal of keeping it short and sweet. However, if you’re in the Jacksonville, Florida area, do give us a shout if you have more questions. We can help you with anything related to your website, from creation to ranking.