The term Search Engine Optimization is abbreviated as SEO. It refers to the updating of the website and its related factors in order to get noticed in the crowded marketplace on the internet.
To bring your business in front of people, optimizing the webpages and the content in it is necessary. These things are taken into consideration by search engines like Google to rank websites. When you rank higher on search engine result pages, more people recognize you.
This creates brand awareness and builds authority among competitors. Hence, you are easily noticeable to your target audience.
A decade ago, SEO was simple. The basic factor was to pick the keywords related to your niche and location to make the website visible. Besides that, the internet was less competitive for companies.
But as the years have passed, new methods have come up. Apart from key-words, several other factors combine to determine the authority of a site. They include loading time, mobile-friendliness, backlinks, reviews, mentions, etc.
Now, SEO is divided into on-site and off-site SEO. There is generally a confusion among people regarding both of these terms.
In this article, we will discuss their meaning and see how despite being different, both are equally important in getting a good search engine rank.
Online SEO is another term for On-site optimization. It refers to direct methods of changing factors that influence a site’s search engine rank.
Posting a new blog, adding links to old blogs, promoting a new service, making changes to the website, all these falls under the on-site category.
Search engines get information about your website from the meta tags. With relevant and informative meta-tags, it becomes easier for search engines to discover and crawl your webpages.
They help in increasing click-through rates.
The outline of the page contents is provided by a Title tag. When analyzing a particular site, Google studies the title tag to look for relevance with its content. It gives an bad impression if the title does not relate to the information on the page. This looks spammy.
Similarly, meta description in the snippets let people know what your page is about. So, the description must be like a 2-3 line brief of what your page or content is regarding.
You can conduct keyword research with the free as well as paid tools available online like SEMrush. After doing that, you can insert targeted keywords in your content that have large search volume and less competition.
Place keywords in URLs. Use targeted and related keywords in title tags. You can also naturally place keywords while writing blogs. Alt text for images can include niche tags. Search engines note these characteristics while rating a site.
Moreover, making the site mobile-first as a majority of people surf the internet from their phones.
All these changes made directly on the website are a subcategory of On-site SEO.
The process that you undertake to enhance web rank without actually making changes to your site is off-site SEO. It can be getting links from other sites, posting on social media or even offline marketing.
This kind of optimization does not necessarily have to be online. Physical marketing with traditional methods to get brand awareness and as a result, get more visits on a website also fall under this category.
Offline SEO is conducted away from the website to attract more traffic to the website. It does not need to be carried out on the internet. You can post blogs on other blogs in exchange for a backlink to your webpage. This is one of the most fruitful methods of off-site SEO.
There are three types of links included in offline SEO by the way they are received:
- Natural links – These are received without any request by the owner of the website. For example, someone linking to your blog as a source of data pr proof.
- Manual links – Links earned by Guest Posting, convincing customers to link to your content or asking an influencer to redirect to your page are manual links.
- Self-created links – Such links are created by adding the website to an online directory, press releases, or adding links to comments. These tactics are generally considered as shadowy by crawlers and can be considered black hat SEO methods. Be careful if you are opting for a self-created linking process.
Natural links from sites relevant to your niche support you in giving confidence to search engines about your authority. It indicates that your website is trusted by others.
By writing high-quality content for Guest Posts for getting backlinks you can improve the authority score. Choose Guest Posting sites with higher domain authority. You can check the accurate authority on SEMrush or use other free tools.
Take the help of social media to promote your blog and website. You can carry out polls, Q&A sessions, hashtag contests, and giveaways.
Now you are familiar with the difference between both the types of SEO methods. Make the best use of offline and online optimization to get better ranking for your sites on Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Let us know if you have any further questions on the topic. Leave your questions in the comments section.