Your Ultimate Guide to Do on-Page and off-Page SEO

Google holds 74.19% of the search engine market in 2019, whereas approximately 50% of all website traffic comes from organic searches.

According to smallbizgenius "Leads from SEO are eight times more likely to become paying customers than those generated through traditional ad campaigns." However, Google considers on-page and off-page SEO elements as the ranking factors for a website.

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So, without further ado, let’s get started.

What is SEO?

SEO is the practice of improving the quality and quantity of relevant organic traffic to your website from search engines.

Below is an example of SEO where a website ranks for the keyword ‘online shopping’.

What_is_SEO

Neil Patel says, "If your article is on any other page of the Google search results than the first, it's the equivalent of it not ranking at all."

What_is_SEO2

Types Of SEO

If you plan to rank your website on the first page of SEO, we need to know its types.

SEO has 2 broad categories: On-page and Off-page SEO.

We'll first begin with on-page SEO. Let's understand why it matters, and what are the essential on-page SEO considerations that you must focus in order to succeed.

On-Page SEO

It is the process of optimizing elements on your website itself.

Below are the important ranking factors of on-page SEO that you'll need to take a look at.

  1. Keyword Research
  2. Title Tag
  3. Meta Description
  4. Header Tag
  5. Keyword Usage
  6. Internal Links
  7. Site Maps

Keyword Research

  • It is an important activity in on-page SEO.
  • It is a method of choosing the primary and secondary keywords around which we will base meta tags and the content on.
  • The primary components of keyword research are below:
    • Search volumes
    • Competition
    • Relevancy
  • Also, you can use a keyword research tool like:

Keyword

Did You know?

  • Search engine bots use NLP while crawling a website. 
  • With NLP, google looks for relevant content and keyword.
  • For example: When your website is about bake cakes, and if you have only the keyword cakes used in it, then you might not rank for the keyword bake cakes in search engine results. 
  • It's important to add some LSI keywords like how to bake a cake, easy cake recipes, best homemade cakes, etc.

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Title Tag 

  • Title tag is the header on-page element displayed on Search Engine Results Pages.
  • The title tag gives preference to the character limit, for example, Google displays the first 50–60 characters of a title tag on SERP.
  • These tags summarize the website's content.
  • Title tag influences click-through rates.

The keyword for the below on-page examples is ‘Tasty Cuisine’.

Example -

Title_tag

Next comes, meta description. 

Meta Description 

  • A meta description is a brief description of approximately 155 characters that gives an overview of the webpage content.
  • It is shown on the SERP.
  • Meta description also influences click-through rates.

Example -

Meta_desc

URL 

  • URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator.
  • Creating SEO-friendly URLs for websites helps in understanding what the webpage is about.
  • Always avoid poor structure of URL in SEO as it results in a very low ranking.
  • An example of poor URL structures is:

URLs: https://www.earn.com/courses/digital-marketing/Bangalore?gclid=EAIaIQobCh

Example-

URL

Next comes one of the important on-page elements, i.e., header tags.

Header Tags 

  • Header tags help in identify headings and subheadings of webpage content.
  • The hierarchy of HTML tags starts from H1 to H6.
  • Here, H1 is the main heading of a page, the H2 tag is a subheading of H1 and H3 is a subheading of H2, and so on.
  • For Google, the header tags are easier to crawl and understand the web page content.

Example-

header_tags

Internal Link 

  • An internal link is a link that connects from one web page of a domain to another web page of the domain.
  • These links help users to navigate the website with no hassle.
  • These links are helpful to spread link equity. 

Note: Link equity passes a value from one domain to another domain

Example - Keywords: Simplilearn

internal_links

Sitemaps 

  • Sitemaps are a hierarchy list of websites.
  • It helpful for both end-users and search engines in order to understand the structure of a website.
  • Sitemaps have 2 types:
    • HTML sitemaps: Designed for humans
    • XML sitemaps: Designed for crawlers

An example of HTML sitemap -

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “ -//W2C//XTX HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN”>

<html lang=“en”>

<head>

<meta http-equiv=“Content-Type” content=“text/html; charset=UTF-8”>

<meta http-equiv=“Content-Style-Type” content=“text/css”>

<title>Sitemap</title>

</head>

An example of XML sitemap -

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

<url>

<loc>https://services.amazon.in</loc>

<lastmod>2018-12-16</lastmod>

<changefreq>Weekly</changefreq>

<priority>0.8</priority>

</url>

Paying attention to the above 7 ranking areas will enhance your website ranking, traffic, and conversion.

Next comes Off-page SEO. Optimizing off-page SEO improves the website's popularity, domain authority, awareness, and credibility. 

So, let's get started with off-page SEO.

Off-Page SEO

  • It is the method of promoting a website with the help of link building.
  • As a result, it enhances the website's recognition, credibility, trustworthiness, and authority.

What is Link Building?

  • Link building is the practice of acquiring online hyperlinks from other websites to your website with the aim of enhancing your search engine visibility.
  • In this way, we can drive referral traffic and increase the website's authority and credibility.
  • Strategies of link building:
    • High-quality content creation
    • Off-site engagement

Types of Link Building

Below are 2 types of links that an individual should know for his business or clients.

Do-Follow

These links encourage search engine bots to follow the link for a good boost over SERP and pass the link juice to the destination webpage.

Below is an example of Dofollow Link:

<a href=”http://www.simplilearn.com/”>simplilearn</a>

NoFollow-

These links don't allow bots to follow the link. As a result, link juice

is not passed to the destination domain. 

An example of Nofollow Link:

<a href=”http://www.simplilearn.com/”> rel=”nofollow “simplilearn</a>

Types of Links

Below are the types of links that a marketer should know for off-page SEO.

Inbound Links

It comes from an external website to your website.

Note: We also call Inbound links as backlinks

Outbound Links

It will direct a user from your website to an external website.

Moving further, let's discuss what the Off-site engagements are. 

Off-site Engagement

Some of the off-site engagements are:

  • Getting help from influencer marketing.
  • Engaging with the audience on multiple social media platforms (like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.)
  • Bookmarking your webpage on popular bookmarking sites (like stumbleupon.com)
  • Participating in forum discussions (like Reddit, Flickr, etc.)
  • Joining high PR Q&A sites and posting answers to the questions related to your business (like Quora, EHow, etc.)

With this, we have come to the end of the article on on-page and off-page SEO.

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Conclusion

That was all about the article regarding on-page and off-page SEO. If you focus on these on-page and off-page elements, you'll drive more organic traffic to your website and enhance your search rankings without risking a Google penalty.

Whether you're an experienced Digital marketer or aspiring to break into this exciting industry, enrolling in our Digital Marketing Master's program will help you with all levels of experience master Digital Marketing techniques and strategies. 

If you have any doubts about the article o n-page and off-page SEO, please feel free to drop a message in the comments section of this article; our experts will get back to you as soon as possible. 

About the Author

Sana AfreenSana Afreen

Sana Afreen is a Senior Research Analyst at Simplilearn and works on several latest technologies. She holds a degree in B. Tech Computer Science. She has also achieved certification in Advanced SEO. Sana likes to explore new places for their cultures, traditions, and cuisines.

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