What’s the difference between onsite and offsite SEO?

When you first embark on an SEO programme the tasks and factors involved can be quite daunting.  So many details that require your attention. Don’t do this but do that etc. You’ve probably read many conflicting articles or websites each one proclaiming to be the oracle when it comes to SEO. There’s 2 different types of SEO – Onsite and offsite, both require different things. Below we will break it down and make it simple to understand, we won’t go into too much detail but will give you a broad scope of what each strategy requires.

On-site

Basically this is what you do on your website to make it SEO ready. Such things as text content, metatags, site speed, navigation and sitemaps are all classed as onsite SEO. So for example including your chosen keywords or phrases within the text content of your website is onsite SEO.  Making sure the metatags (the coding that search engines read) are all optimised to include keywords and descriptions about what you provide. These should be unique to each page as well. Alt tags are the tags that describe an Image, these can be added in the websites code and should be used to include keywords.

The text content of your site is one of the main aspects of onsite SEO. You should have plenty of descriptive text on each page describing what you provide. URL’s can also be onsite SEO with keywords in your URL file path, for example if you sell green wellies an SEO URL would be yoursite.co.uk/green-wellies.

Always remember thought to do your keyword research before and  make sure you are optimising your website to target the right keywords which are relevant, likely to be searched by people for what you provide and more importantly they have search volume. There’s no point doing onsite SEO for keywords or phrases that only get searched 5 times a month. If you are unsure on how to do this we can help.

Including H1 and H2 header tags with keywords is a big plus for onsite SEO as well. Maybe as a title for a paragraph of text or tagline on your homepage. Another big aspect is making sure your site is mobile friendly too and fully responsive. This now more then ever is vitally important especially for Google to rank you high.

Internal linking is also a factor, making sure there is a clear cut navigation journey for your site visitors and also search engine spiders, these are the bots that come  and take a virtual picture of your site and its content and decide where to rank you for what keywords. Also make sure you have no broken links too as this will work against you.

Off-site

This is the more labour intensive process for ranking your website high in search engine results but it’s also vital. However, you must also always make sure you have fully optimised your website with onsite SEO before starting any offsite SEO strategy.  So, it’s always onsite SEO first THEN offsite SEO afterwards.

One main aspect of offsite SEO is link building. So, getting other websites to link back to you, ideally with your keyword as the clickable link. However, don’t just go out and get links from any resource. Always try get good quality websites to link to you, ideally those that rank high itself and even better if they are in the same industry as your website.

 

If your inbound link is from a trusted website then that sends trust points to your website so to speak. If your links come from poor websites then again your website will be adversely affected. Link building should be a steady long term part of your offsite SEO. Don’t rush out and get 50 links a day as this may be classed as spam by Google. Avoid paying for links too as usually they are from untrustworthy sources.

Writing blogs to publish on 3^rd party sites is a good way to get inbound links. Also posting on social media and getting other social media accounts to post or Tweet about your website with a link back is also a good strategy. Guest posts on other websites is a good natural way to increase inbound links back to your website.

Reviews can also be a good way to get inbound links so maybe look to incorporate this into your offsite SEO strategy.