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Your Search Engine Optimisation Campaign is more than just a checklist – it can be the difference between Page 1 and Page Nowhere. SEO Strategy is generally divided into two categories known as ‘On Page’ and ‘Off Page’. Both are equally crucial to the success of the campaign, but they are on the opposite sides of the SEO fence when it comes to improving your SERP Rankings.

To understand the difference between the two you have to first develop a rudimentary understanding of how Search Engine Algorithms work. Luckily, Big Gun Digital are the experts here. Let’s break it down. There are two main pools that search engines such as Google or Bing look at when comparing your site to other similar sites on the web:

On Page: What is your site about?

Off Page: How Authoritative is your site?

Put simply, what you rank FOR is largely based on ON PAGE details, and how HIGH you rank is attributed to OFF PAGE factors.

What is On Page SEO?

On Page SEO, also known as On-Site SEO, is the process of optimisation on different parts of your website that affect your search engine rankings. On Page SEO is the stuff you have complete control over and you have the power the change. The biggest factors of On Page SEO are:

TITLE TAGS

A Title Tag is essentially the title of the page. Put your targeted keywords in the title tag of each page on your site. There are many best practices that go into writing an effective title tag.

HEADINGS

Headings are the largest words on the page, and for that reason, Search Engines give them considerably more weight than your other page copy.  It is a good idea to work your target keywords into the headings of each web page but make sure you accurately reflect your page content.

ALT TEXT FOR IMAGES

Any content management system should allow you to add something called “alt text” to all images on your website.  This text isn’t visible to the average visitor – alt text is in fact used by screen reader software to help blind internet users understand the content of your images. Search engines crawl images in a similar way, so inserting some relevant keywords while accurately describing the image will help search engines understand your page’s content.

PAGE LOAD SPEED

Search Engines such as Google want to help its surfers find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible to provide the best user experience. Therefore, optimizing your pages to load faster helps your site rank higher in the search results. There are many ways to achieve this – get in touch if you want further advice on improving page load speed.

PAGE CONTENT

The content on your pages needs to be useful to the people reading it, obviously! If they search for something too specific to find your page, they need to be able to find what they’re looking for. The page copy needs to be easy to read and provide value to the end user.

INTERNAL LINKING

It is really important to spread internal links throughout your content. As the title may suggest, an internal link is a link to another one of your pages in your pages. Here’s an internal link to another blog post on our site that talks more about internal linking. Very meta!

On Page SEO ensures that your website can be interpreted by the potential customers who have reached your site and the Search Engine Robots alike. It is only with a well implemented On Page SEO strategy that Search Engines can easily index your web pages, understand what your site is trying to achieve and easily navigate the content and structure of the site. It uses these factors to rank your site accordingly.

Be sure to pop the keywords into your URL structure if possible. However, do not go changing all of your current URLs just so they have keywords in them. You shouldn’t change old URLs unless you plan on redirecting your old ones to your new ones. Read Big Gun Digitals guide to 301 Redirects here. Give us a shout if you need any advice or guidance.

Big Gun borg

BorG Says…

Big Gun Digital is a Google-Accredited SEO Agency. If you are looking for a local company (what’s the advantages of hiring a local SEO Agency?)  to drive your businesses digital strategy then we’re confident we can help. Currently, we are one of the forces behind a number of successful companies in Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire & London. We also propel a few European website strategies.

What is Off-Page SEO?

Off Page SEO focuses on increasing the authority of your domain through a process of acquiring links from other websites. A good metaphor for the workings of Off Page SEO is this: if you have a bathtub full of rubber duckies (the duckies are your pages here, stick with me!) and you start to fill the bath with water (some external links), your duckies will start to rise to the top. Sites like Wikipedia, Police Force Pages and BBC News employ Off Page SEO strategies like this. Big sites like these have the water level put right to the top and so throwing more duckies into the bathtub means that they will float to the top with minimal effort. This is called “Domain Authority” – a score assigned by search engines to define how authoritative your site is to other sites.

One of the biggest Off Page SEO factors is the number and quality of backlinks to your website. Some examples of ways you can build links to your website are:

+   Creating content so awesome that people want to link to because it is valuable.
+   Social media shares of your content that ultimately generate links.
+   Outreach e-mails to influencers in your industry that ultimately link to you.
+   Guest blogging on sites related to yours.  These guest posts will have links back to your site.

While link quantity is still important, content creators and SEO professionals are realising that link quality is now more important than link quantity, and as such, creating shareable content is the first step to earning valuable links and improving your off-page SEO.

How many links do you need for good off-page SEO?  That is a tough question and it’s going to be based on the domain authority of your competitors, as you want to make sure you’re playing in the same sandbox. SEOs also used to believe that buying links was a valid way of link building; however, Google will now penalise you for buying links in an attempt to manipulate page rank. You can also be penalised for submitting your links to link directories whose sole purpose is to increase your domain authority. Again, quality wins out over quantity when it comes to link building.

Is On Page or Off Page SEO More Important?

It’s not about choosing between on and off-page SEO, that would be like having to choose between a foundation or a roof for your house. On-page and off-page SEO work together to improve your search engine rankings in complementary fashion; however, SEOs generally advise getting your on-page SEO ducks in a row before focusing too much on off-page SEO. Just like building a house, you want to set the foundation first before building the rest of the house.  Like a foundation, you may need to come back and do some maintenance to your on-page SEO from time to time. Balancing the two will help make your website “bilingual” so that your users can understand it as well as the search engine robots- and that’s how your rankings start to improve.

<< Get in Touch with Big Gun Digital Today! >>

Credit must go to George Zlatin at Chicago’s Digital Third Coast, for the Analogy and Content Ideas. Check them out here.

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