On-page SEO & Off-page SEO

One of the first things many new webmasters do in an attempt to conquer the top positions in search engines is to rush to on-page SEO. While on-page SEO is a powerful tool, relying solely on it isn’t enough. On-page SEO alone is simply not powerful enough to drive your site to the top of search engines.

What Is On-page SEO and Off-page SEO?

Basically, on-page SEO includes all the techniques you apply to the text and meta of your pages. Just about all these techniques involve keywords. To get relevant keywords, use keyword research tools and analyze your site’s stats. Examples for on-page SEO are:

• creating unique title tags and h1 and h2 tags
• using unique meta description and meta keywords
• using URLs that include keywords; avoiding long nonsensical strings
• interlinking all pages well within the site with relevant anchor text
• creating keyword rich pages

Off-page SEO, as the name implies, includes strategies applied anywhere but your actual website. Examples of off-page SEO techniques are:

• getting backlinks from high PR pages on other websites with relevant anchor text (check your competitors’ backlinks to find relevant sites)
• creating a presence on a few social networking sites
• participating in forums as an expert
• writing guest posts
• bookmarking on Digg, StumbleUpon etc.
• submitting to directory and search engine listings
• article marketing
• creating and offering widgets for your site
• answering questions on ‘answer sites’ as an expert

Both on-page SEO and off-page SEO are important. Sometimes you might use only one of them, but in most cases you will be using both. If you don’t combine on-page SEO with off-page SEO, you may not get the results you envision. In other words, it is important to have keyword rich text (on-page SEO) and quality backlinks (off-page SEO), for example.

Combining On-page SEO and Off-page SEO

Having good keyword density and keywords in strategic places will be more effective if you also have quality backlinks for example. A PR5 backlink with your keywords as the anchor text can be more important than on-page keyword density. On the other hand, if you don’t have good keyword density, that’s not good either. So it is best to have both, good keyword density and quality backlinks. If one of these are missing, it may hurt your SEO results.

The bottom line is that using on-page SEO and off-page SEO techniques will give you better results than only one or the other.

It would be great if there was an ultimate formula for the successful combination of on-page SEO and off-page SEO, but, as you may have guessed by now, there isn’t. Finding the right balance between on-page SEO and off-page SEO for your specific site is what’s crucial. Each site will demand it’s own balance. It’s a matter of available resources you have for SEO, the niche of your website, business model, etc.

On top of that, ranking algorithms change frequently, so even if you manage to find a good balance between on-page SEO and off-page SEO today, you may not get the same results from your strategy in the future. For example, currently quality backlinks have a relatively high weight and if you invest some efforts in building quality backlinks, you’ll most likely see some positive results for your efforts. But this may change in the future. Reality is that SEO is an ongoing process and in order to keep your site ranking well, your on-page and off-page SEO strategy should be analyzed and updated on a regular basis.

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