On Site SEO Vs. Off Site SEO What Is The Difference

For some of you reading the title to this post you may be scratching your head wondering what this is all about. Many people believe SEO (search engine optimization) is all about what they do on their website and do not realize it also deals with what they do off of their website that can make a difference as well. Gone are the days of “optimizing” your meta keyword tags with small variations of the same search phrase you want to rank for, stuffing your content, hiding text to make the search engines think that page is relevant and submitting your pages to the search engines. All of the things I just listed above are so far from the island of truth you couldn’t fly there.

Sadly their are still individuals and companies out there looking to make a quick buck by practically scamming unsuspecting people with bogus information. Ask them what they will do for both on site and off site optimization and they will have no real answer. So today I will be going over what the differences are and why BOTH play an important roll in ranking your website higher within the search engines.

On Site SEO

On site SEO is everything within the coding of your actual website. You can add, edit or remove content and code at an given time. You have complete control over this factor and this is only one piece to the puzzle of achieving higher rankings. Factors for on site SEO include:

Page title
Meta Tags (description tag is really the important one)
Actual site content (what your pages say within them)
Internal link structure
Semantics
Headings (H1, ect.) within your content
Outbound links (who you are linking to)

Off Site SEO

Off site SEO is everything you do or try to do for your website that is not actually on your website. Yes I know, sounds strange but off site SEO is about building back links to your website from other websites within your niche. A niche is nothing more then a category for your website. In this case let’s take your real estate website. It would be better for you to be receiving back links from other real estate related websites then it would be getting links from a clothing website. Google’s algorithm (how they rank websites) gets smarter as time goes on and now pass more weight (relevance) to that link from John Doe’s real estate website then that of Jane’s clothing website. I will go into further details regarding types of backlinks another time.

Press releases, article submissions, guest blog posts, social bookmarking are also forms of off site SEO and really focus around getting more links to your website. With these you have control, for the most part to make sure your efforts are optimized for your website. When you write a press release, article or be a guest author on someone’s blog you can control the links written within. Instead of saying “click here to visit our site” you would say visit our “Dallas Texas Real Estate” website or John Doe is a licensed “Dallas Texas Real Estate Agent” and have keywords that you are trying to rank for as the anchor link pointing to your website. Many people do not realize this and think a link is a link, please get me more. It is not about quantity, but the quality of the link that really matters.

What Should I Focus More On Then

The real answer is BOTH on site and off site SEO, as they go hand in hand in achieving a better ranking for your website. I suggest you first straighten up the on site SEO within your website since you have control over that and can make the changes rather quickly depending on the size of your site. Once you have your on site SEO problem fixed, then start focusing on your off site SEO. Keep in mind though, any new content you add to your current website you will want to make sure is optimized properly so you will not have to go back and redo any of the work.

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