It’s no secret that having a strong digital strategy is important for ensuring your business thrives these days. An important part of all digital marketing strategies is something called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is a great way to improve your online ranking by a considerable level. By properly utilizing SEO, you can ensure your website and business gets more visits by having it rank higher on platforms such as Google and Bing.
When it comes to SEO, there are two terms that play very important roles in the process, and it’s important that you know these terms and understand the differences between them. These terms are On-Site & Off-Site SEO.
On-Site vs Off-Site
On-Site (Also known as On-Page)
To keep this simple, On-Site SEO is a method of optimizing your website that will make it easier for search engines to find, index, and list it. You should start by researching and finding the right keywords that relate to your company. Afterward, you will need to integrate the keywords into your website’s overall structure, content, page titles, metadata, headers, and wherever else it makes sense to add the words. It’s also important that you make sure all of your content and metadata are structured properly, which includes keeping titles and descriptions within a certain number of characters and using correct header codes. Once you’ve completed On-Site SEO, it’s important that you constantly monitor and update your SEO plan over time in order to optimize the results.
Off-Site (Also known as Off-Page)
Off-Site SEO isn’t as simple as On-Site SEO. It involves multiple tasks and generally requires on-going work. To explain it in more simple terms, it’s the idea of creating, maintaining, and optimizing as much content and/or profiles as possible on alternative websites and platforms that link back to your website. Or alternatively, it can be defined as actions that are taken outside of your own website.
Backlinks Explained
A major part of Off-Site SEO is something called backlinking. It’s important to understand how backlinking works because search engine algorithms have evolved to the point where they’re able to recognize the difference between quality backlinks and low-quality backlinks. Low-quality backlinks can do some serious harm to your effort in trying to get your website recognized.
As I stated above, backlinks are created when content from one website is linked to the content of another website. They are also named as “incoming links” or “inbound links”, and play an essential role in Off-Site SEO. The process of obtaining backlinks can be referred to as link building or link earning, and it is important to know that some backlinks are more valuable compared to others.
Setting up backlinks with websites that have been deemed “high-authority” is the ultimate goal. High-authority websites are ones that have built credibility and popularity over time and have also been recognized by platforms such as Google and BING. In other words, getting a website like ‘The Globe and Mail’ or ‘BBC’ to link to your website would be considered a high-quality backlink based on these criteria.
You can view a list of high authority websites here: https://moz.com/top500
Off-Site Profiles
It’s important to build backlinks from websites that contain content similar to yours. For example, contractors can create profiles on sites such as GlonStruct, TrustedPros, and Houzz, while Real Estate professionals can use sites such as Realter.com, Rate My Agent, REW (Canada), and Trulia (USA). Each industry has its own version of high-authority websites that industry professionals can explore. In addition, blogs and social media platforms are also super important resources to use for content and backlinks.
Keep in mind, it’s very important to make sure all of your business information, posts and content are in-sync across all your platforms, profiles and websites. This can be done efficiently and easily through syndication services, such as the one Beanstalk Growth Marketing offers.
The Dark Side of Backlinking
The fact is, backlinks create credibility between sites and businesses. Backlinks also provide an easy way for search engines to crawl between different sources of content. However, backlinks also have a dark side. If your website gets linked to low-quality, spammy, or backlinks that have been paid for, they can pose a penalty on your website and leave a negative impact on your domain authority. And so, it’s important that you take care in ensuring you only end up with only high-quality, relatable backlinks.
It’s important to develop a smart backlinking strategy. While working on your website’s backlinking plan, you can refer to Google’s Webmaster’s Guidelines to perform a quick audit of your backlinks. If it turns out that you have some unnatural links to your website, it is best to reach out to the source and ask them to remove the link or if that doesn’t work then you will need to disavow them as soon as possible using Google’s disavow tool.
Ready To Get Started?
If you want to get ahead of your competition, On-Site and Off-Site SEO should play an important role in your digital marketing strategy. By working on these two items, you can significantly increase your positioning online, attract more people to your website, and ultimately produce more leads and sales.
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Want to take it one step further? Check out our article on why Online Reviews are important and how they are affecting your online ranking.
