Effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has shifted over the past few years. SEO techniques have developed considerably, so modifications need to be made to your current strategy to make full use of these changes (including Off-Site SEO and On-Site SEO).
On-page and on-site SEO are important methods that are used to maximize the impact of your content pages.
On-Site SEO
This refers to all the things you can do to your website to ensure that the website home page ranks highly in search engines.
On-Page SEO
Similarly, this refers to the other individual pages on your site.
Previously it was important just to get a click through, but now it’s all about the content. Search engines can see how people are interacting with your website, they know if your customers are finding the pages they are they’re looking for.
This is post-click activity and analysis of this is needed to find out what is working, but more importantly, what isn’t – for it is here that you will lose customers. You need to satisfy user intent; to keep the customer on your company website; to entice them to read and discover more of the content that is relevant to them. But you also need to do that quickly and smoothly. No one likes waiting around, after all, in a world of greed, time is the most precious thing and something that can’t be bought.
The days of driving traffic to your site by packing headlines with keywords are long gone, in fact, this is actually penalized in the Google Algorithm. Jordan Whelan of Grey Smoke Media, a leading Toronto PR and Media Buying Company, stresses that, ‘If you want the best and safest on-page optimization for your website, consider keeping the entire keyword ration in the page between 2% to 4%. Doing so could help your website avoid Google Algorithm penalties. In general, it is perhaps best to approach content creation from the point of view of ease and comprehensibility for your readers. Rather than being too concerned with striking a precise optimal keyword density, aim for a natural style that reads well and you should have no concerns about keyword stuffing.’
This will also help the user experience (UX). UX should be in the forefront of all web developers, SEO experts and content writers. For example, people are sick of having to look up what acronyms mean, they’re fed up of webpages that no longer make sense as they are stuffed with keywords, of which many are irrelevant to the text, and they are tired of wading through walls of text when simplification and white space make things easier to absorb. This isn’t dumbing things down, this is being customer focussed. Websites should always be written with the lowest literacy level of readership in mind, and written to that audience. That way you are not isolating any potential customers.
On-page or on-site optimization can be beneficial when looking for good rankings for your website, and can be crucial when you are trying to establish your company in the number one ranking position on Google.
A major part of this is related to the way your website is structured and coded in HTML. TITLE tags, META descriptions and H1tags alongside ALT tags on images are all-important.
Generating Off-Site SEO
However, it is off-page or off-site optimization that will really get you up the rankings in Google. This can be in the form of backlinks.
Backlinks to your website that use relevant keywords in the anchor text ensure that search engines understand what your site is all about. Look for educational sites for quality and explore untapped sources.
But why would you only ever concentrate on one and not the other? Use both and see your rankings improve.