I’ve already written a couple of blogs on the rather mystical world of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). For example, in “How a search engine works: SEO 101,” we talked a bit about how search engines work and how knowing that information can help you build and/or improve your website. In today’s post, we’ll talk more about two major parts of search engine optimisation: on-page and off-page SEO.
The heart of SEO
Just to recap from our previous article, search engine optimisation is the art of creating websites in a way that makes it easy for search engines to identify, categorise and select them when a user does an online search.
There are many elements within SEO, but all of them can basically be broken down into two major groups:
- On-page (on-site) SEO, or the content within your website; and
- Off-page (off-site) SEO, focusing on content outside (and/or linking back to) your site
So why is this important? And what should you do?
First of all, here’s why this is important: When someone does a search in Google (or other search engine), only about 10 sites show up on the first page. Most people only click on the top few sites, and they’re unlikely to go past the first page of results. Therefore, if your site ranks at the top of the first Search Engine Results Page (SERP), you’ll get a lot of traffic to your site – and that’s good for your business.
However, if your site shows up on the second or third page, you might only get 1% of the search traffic that the top-ranked sites get. Therefore, it’s important to create great content and build good links to and from your site so Google thinks your website is more relevant and provides a better user experience for a particular search term that the remaining hundreds (or thousands) of results.
That leads us back to:
On-page (or on-site) optimisation
On-page SEO, therefore, is what’s displayed on your website, and it includes the written copy that visitors read and search engines see. To help with this on your site, make sure you write high-quality content that people can understand, incorporating the keywords for that particular page if possible in your heading and/or sub-headings as well as the body copy.
More technical aspects of on-page SEO include using keywords in your page titles, photograph labels and other ‘hidden’ elements such as metatags, but we’ll discuss that in a future post.
There is a need to add content regularly in order to continually appeal to Google. An easy way to do this is by adding a blog to your website. Add relevant content to the blog and promote interactivity with your visitors. You can leverage this content on social media sites too, which really helps with SEO.
Here’s another tip: Make sure you have unique content on every page of your site. It’s definitely possible that there will be some overlap of information, but search engines recognise duplicate content that’s out there just for the sake of trying to get a better rank.
Then there is . . .
Off-page (off-site) optimisation
A good way of looking at off-page SEO is to think of it as work done away from your site but directly affects its rankings through building the credibility, relevance and profile of your URL. Off-page optimisation comprises many things, but a major element is the links your site has to and from other sites. Google and other search engines look at how many links you have, but they also review the quality of those links. As we noted in our post on Google and the Penguin, Google has recently updated their algorithm to penalise sites that put in links unrelated to their site content. A really basic link to start with though, is to submit your website to the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) owned by Google.
Other factors that Google looks at are things like videos, infographics, press releases, guest blog articles, presentations and connections to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. These things all help with your ranking, too.
Have questions about this? Let us know – and stay tuned for more posts on SEO!
