Digital Marketing

On-Page SEO & Off-Page SEO | Checklist, Techniques & Tricks

Last updated at 19-11-2021

Understanding concepts of On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO

 

Everyone wishes to have their website appear in top search results, to have improved visibility and higher authority in search. You cannot just create a web page and hope to rank on Google search engine until you make them rank by using multiple techniques of search engine optimization (SEO). The best search engine optimization strategy used today by SEO Experts for business and webpages organic traffic generation is On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO techniques.

But before we head to understanding the concept of On-page and Off-Page SEO, we must learn what they really are, why we need them and what are the techniques, and how to perform them for improved rankings.

What is Off-Page SEO?

Off-page optimization refers to techniques that help websites to appear higher in search rankings. It doesn't invest in optimizing your site or content but it uses tactics off of your website to increase your website’s authority in a search engine results page(SERPS). Often, off-page SEO is associated with link building strategy but it is more than that and includes strategies like blogging, website design, social bookmarking for a website’s promotion. Tactics like outreach, participating in forums and leaving comments on blogs are a few from many Off-page SEO strategies.

Off-Page SEO Techniques

We need Off-page SEO techniques because they take place outside the website i.e everything you will do, wouldn’t be visible to your web page but it will impact your websites’ search engine rankings. While performing Off-Page SEO techniques, you focus on your websites’ social amplification, review, brand mention and generate several quality links pointing to your website, i.e. called backlinks. 

Backlinks are super important for your website to rank over SERPs and if you earn an authority backlink from a reliable site, it will boost your websites’ visibility and trustworthiness for the site visitors. Also, remember building backlinks for off-page SEO is all about quality… not quantity so, focus on building relevant, authority and SEO-friendly links.

What are Off-page SEO techniques and how do they benefit? 

Some of the most common Off-Page SEO techniques are below described for you,

1. Manual Link-Building:

It's one of the most important Off-Page SEO Techniques where you reach out manually asking for links as they aren’t naturally occurring links. The best way to manual link-building is influencer outreach where you involve influencers in your content creation and ask them to share it along with linking back to you.

2. Self-created links:

A natural link or a self-created link shows search engines that your website is trustworthy, valuable, and authoritative. And to have self-created links for your website, you must involve in Off-page techniques like forum submission, blog directory submission, and article submission. 

But overdoing such activities makes Google consider you as a Black Hat SEO strategist and your activities as Black Hat SEO so make sure you are in control while working on self-created links or be ready to have a significant penalty from Google. Also, before submitting your websites to any directories check whether they are trustworthy or not with high domain authority. Doing so will prevent your website from having spam backlinks.

3. Social Sharing:

Even when social sharing is not up for direct website ranking, but strategists do believe that Social sharing inconsistent manner provide websites with indirect SEO benefits and some of them are,

• Improved brand awareness after business exposure to a bigger audience
• Rise in the number of inbound links and brand mentions.
• Social media platforms help you reach your targeted audience.
• You can promote your content piece easily.
• Social selling can generate revenue.

And if any of your content gets viral over social media, the viral loop results in natural link building and brand mentioning.

4. Guest posting: 

It's a time taking process but they do add benefits to SEO and your brand. Some of the guest posting aspects to consider are,

• Helps expand the area of brand exposure and reach new audiences.
• Improved brand authority, brand mentions and backlinks to your website.
• You earn referral traffic for your webpage.
• Builds and improves your relationships with valuable influencers
• Introduces authors to the audience, who loves reading their post via short bio box.

Any SEO strategist considers including guest posting to their digital strategy making as it offers the above benefits with excellent ROI.

5. Brand Mention:

You can take brand mention as a process where you want people to talk about your services or products in a positive way.

It's a powerful link-building technique and one of the most essential exercises for new websites. The trick is simple, just monitor your brand mentions online while building quality backlinks.

Get in direct touch with the websites uncovering your brand mentions and ask them to include a link along with it. Such new backlinks not only help in brand awareness but also bring tons of referral traffic.

All these off-page SEO techniques help to optimize your website, link building and improving web authority along with creating high-value backlinks that benefit your website rank better than any other website with fewer backlinks.

What is On-Page SEO?

Unlike off-page SEO, the On-page SEO deals with optimizing individual web pages for them to rank over SERP. The optimization of technical elements like tags, site responsiveness, URL Structure, internal links and web page content increases the quality of a page resulting in more traffic generation on an individual page in a search engine.

The quality of backend structure of a site invests more to its ranking but you can't fail to remember about content. Content is for sure the backbone of every successful website, off-page SEO Marketing and other campaigns. So, if you do on-page SEO for your website, start with content and make sure they are unique, informative, and keyword-rich.

Why do we need On-Page SEO?

Before starting with off-page SEO you need a strong on-page optimization for your web pages to proceed with backlinking and link-building techniques under off-page SEO strategy.

You need your websites’ technical aspects to be optimized and old content refreshment before the target audience hit your webpages. Doing so will offer the site visitors a user-friendly experience and they return often in the future to be welcomed with the same speed and efficiency.  And when you make your website look more engaging to the users, Google awards your website with a decent boost in SEO rankings.

What are On-Page SEO techniques? 

For your website to rank top over the SERP, it takes both content and technical aspects to be optimized. So, here are many different technical aspects of a webpage that you must optimize with on-page SEO. Learn how On-Page SEO techniques can help you to come in first page results. Use this On-Page checklist to improve your search result ranking in google.

Title tags - Best On-Page SEO technique:

Title tags are the unique and descriptive name of a webpage that gets displayed on SERPs as the clickable title. It consists of information about the page for the visitors and search engines along with targeted keywords and are required to be 60 characters in length or less.

Here in this image, “10 Essential On-Page SEO Factors…” acts as a Title tag for a certain webpage.

Meta descriptions - Heart and Soul of On-Page SEO: 

The brief but vivid description to title tags within 160 characters in length are known as Meta description and they always appear below the title and the URL of the webpage. It tells the search engines and website visitors about the page and is highly significant as per Google algorithm (AI). Description tags are heart and soul of your On-Page SEO strategies.

In the above image, the content visible under the clickable title tag is a meta description to that web page.

Headings: 

All of web page content must have headings in H1 format for the best results as it is the first element that a site visitor sees when landing on a page. Further, you can use subheadings to have broken up content but make sure your headings are relevant and optimizable with keywords. If you want your content to be ranked high in google, then you cant just ignore use of headings in your On-Page SEO checklist.

URL structure:

A user-friendly URL structure is descriptive of the page’s subject and consists of major keywords. Google reads the URLs and shows the most relevant result compared to the query so, it's important to search engines to determine how relevant a page is by its URL structure.

Example of a user-friendly URL structure is, https://www.lecturely.com/learn-html instead of www.coursentips.com/123456.

Alt text for images:

Alt Text or alternative text is a way for search engines to know more about the images used over a webpage. It should be specific and descriptive of the image content, with maximum 125 character limit.

Site speed:

Page loading speed is a showcase of website performance to Google and site visitors, who expect a site, to load within two seconds. Websites with the minimum page speed and response time are a crucial factor impacting the search rankings. So, make sure you work on your web pages load speed to make them rank on top.

Internal links: 

Google likes the web pages that are optimized and easier to understand, and internal linking is the best way to achieve that. Internal links make your website easy to navigate by visitors and Google to index.

Responsiveness: 

Users’ experience visiting your site shouldn’t diminish depending on the devices used. So, whether it's a mobile device or a desktop your page responsiveness must be equally effective and satisfying.

Similarly, other technical aspects like keywords and content are the major part of On-page SEO. where the content makes your web page engaging, keywords are the glue that holds together your on-page SEO strategy.

To help your On-Page SEO technique become more effective, work seamlessly over the content part as this is what brings traffic to your site. Today users are looking for more relevant, interesting, engaging, and informative content in form of Blog. Its all about making user understand your content in an interesting way. Pictures, Video based content, Easy to understand Infographics, Podcasts, Whitepapers, Ebooks, Interviews, Case studies, Original research, Reviews, Instructional Articles, Quizzes and poles for a better learning experience.

Above image shows the search demand for infographics from the year 2008 to 2014.

So these are the On-Page SEO and off-page SEO techniques you need to follow for your website and individual web pages to obtain a decent ranking over Search Engine platforms. Everyone is doing this and so do you to boost your search engine ranking. It's a long marketing approach but the efforts you put in today will surely pay off in the future if you do it right.