What is off page SEO and on page SEO?  That’s the two-for-one question we’re going to make clear here….

Seize Every Opportunity. Right? Use every way that you can to promote and boost your webpage rankings?

Yes, yes indeed.

Also, Search Engine Optimization. SEO is what marketers are all using to drive traffic to their client’s websites.

But did you know that there is more than one type of SEO? Your search engine rankings come from two kinds of optimization: off-page SEO and on-page SEO. Stay with me to learn about the differences between the two and how you can leverage them for your site rankings.

On-Page SEO

On-page is the most familiar type of optimization. This method of increasing your search rankings uses the parts of your website that you can control. Here are a few examples:

Great Content

There’s nothing like a site with tons of information and cool content to drive up visitor numbers and social media shares. The better your content, the more people will want other people to see it and actually cite it in the form of a backlink.  In short, create linkable content assets.

Headings

Search engines pay attention to the size of this font. Incorporating keywords into these headings return better rankings.

Page Load Speed

Google likes people to have a good user experience, so the faster your website visitors can see your content, the better.

Image Descriptions

Screen readers for blind internet users can receive image descriptions from your website using something called “alt text.” Google’s site crawler can see image text descriptions and use that information to get a clearer idea of the content. Google rankings respond well to this information.

Targeted Keywords

These words should go into the title tag of your site. The title tag is the headline that is the link to your site on a search engine page. Just for fun, look at the source of our homepage. The title tag looks like this:

You can look at any website’s title tag and see why they wrote it the way they did. You can also see not-so-great ones. This tag needs to be clear and concise, and give an accurate page description.

You should use your targeted keywords throughout the site and in blog posts. Be careful not to do it too much; it will reduce your content quality, and Google will penalize your rankings due to “keyword stuffing.”

Internal Linking

Linking to other parts of your website is useful to both search engines and visitors. It can give a clearer idea of your site structure and can boost your keyword usage. For example, here is more about SEO marketing.

So, now that you understand more about on-page SEO, let’s look at its ranking partner, off-page SEO.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is the optimization that happens by getting other websites to link back to yours. These links increase your authority in the internet world, and that’s a desirable outcome. For fun, you can plug your domain into this tool to see how authoritative your website is.

Some of the factors that boost your off-page SEO are as follows:

Backlinks

Remember those internal links we talked about? Off-page SEO uses other people’s links back to your site. These are called backlinks and do wonders for your site ranking.

Social Media Shares

This area speaks for itself. The more people promote your site without you asking them to, the better your visitor numbers and authority ranking.

Domain Authority

We touched on this earlier. Your domain authority is graded on a scale of 1-100, and the higher the number, the higher your site will be on the search results pages.

In addition to backlink frequency, authority comes from your domain name history, how long you’ve had your domain and the number of 404 pages that exist on your site.

Self-Promotion

Some ways that you can increase a few of these rankings is through email marketing campaigns that link back to your domain and using guest posts on other sites to link back to yours.

You can also reach out to other industry contacts who may share your content, but don’t pay for them. The more organic the process, the more favourably Google ranks it.

SEO Togetherness

I’m sure it’s clear that a good SEO plan includes both on-page and off-page strategies. One more vital factor to consider is mobile phone searching.

Mobile uses a huge ranking factor. Your website must scale well for mobile users, and it’s not just for general SEO rankings.

In 2015, Google modified its local search pages to return three results instead of seven. The reason? Three results fit on a mobile phone screen more easily. Mobile searches make up nearly 60 percent of all searches, so a non-mobile friendly site is going to hurt your rankings.

Local businesses should employ more off-page SEO strategies than on-page, and here’s why:

That Local 3 is location-based, so when a user searches for “dentists near me,” it’s not going to return a result from 500 miles away. Cultivating great content and great reviews are of the utmost importance for local mobile search results.

Also, businesses desiring to show up in those three spots must maintain a consistent and attractive online presence from which to garner links and positive feedback. Those stars mean a lot to someone looking for products and services.

Ask for Help

You work hard to make sure that your patients are well taken care of, and that your staff is happy. Now that you grasp what’s involved in getting your site to the top of the search results page, you must realize that the process takes time; time to do keyword research and write useful content. It takes time to develop engaging Facebook posts and respond to Google reviews.

We develop strategies and create content so you can focus on your patients. Watch your website move up in the rankings with the help of a company that understands your niche.

Read more about how we set goals and improve your off-page SEO, and contact us for a consultation. Together we can tame the Google beast and watch your practice grow.

The post Off-Page SEO vs On-Page SEO: What’s the Difference? appeared first on Trevor Tynes, SEO Consultant.