On Site vs. Off Site SEO
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Before getting into specifics on how to charge up your site’s SEO strategy, first we need to look into High Traffic Academy. Specifically, let’s talk about onsite SEO in contrast to offsite SEO. Both of these are powerful and integral components of an SEO strategy, but they are very different in how they manifest themselves and how they are implemented.
Onsite SEO refers to anything on your own site (or blog) to improves its ranking in search engine results. This is what most people think of when they think about SEO, and usually they are focusing on keywords. However, there are many other components of a site that contribute to onsite SEO, including:
Each of these things are seen and indexed by Google and the other search engines out there, and so they can all be optimized to improve your site’s page rank and visibility. There are other pieces of onsite SEO, and we’ll get to that whole topic in more depth later on.
By contrast, offsite SEO refers to anything that contributes to your site’s rank in search results, but is not part of your site or blog itself. That may seem like it doesn’t make sense at first blush, since we generally only think about page ranks in terms of our content and site structure, but offsite these offsite factors have actually historically been more important to site rank than content. Some examples of offsite SEO include:
All these offsite SEO components — Twitter feeds, forum posts and the like – are indexed by Google and other search engines, so more mentions of your stuff mean more opportunities for your site to crop up in search results.
There are some parts of offsite SEO that are inherently out of your hands – you can’t control whether someone retweets your link – but there are still plenty of things you can do to both directly and indirectly make offsite SEO work for you. Posting in relevant forms with links back to your site is a direct strategy to boost offsite SEO. Participating in social media conversations and boosting your following can indirectly bolster your offsite SEO, since it makes it more likely that others will share your content.
Using backlinks in forum posts can directly booster your offsite SEO.
The Relationship Between Onsite & Offsite SEO
You may be starting to see now that neither branch of the SEO tree exists in a vacuum. They are linked to one another, and by making a bigger effort in one area, you can get benefits in another.
When you bolster your onsite SEO by keeping up with fresh content, using alt tags in images, optimizing your page titles and all the other SEO tricks in the book, audiences are able to find your site more readily. That’s the whole point, right? Well, when people discover content that they like and that grabs their attention, they share it. They link it on their Facebook walls, they retweet it, the post it in forums and they tell their friends about it. Hence, focusing on your onsite SEO postively influences your offsite SEO.
In the reverse, when you stay active in the online community by engaging in forum conversations, keeping your Facebook profile up to date and tweeting links to your fresh content, you bolster your online presence and make yourself easier to find. People start to find your site and spend some time there, which helps your onsite SEO. Google and other search engines take into account the amount of time people spend on your site, and that boosts page rank. Just like that, your offsite SEO efforts have enhanced those onsite.
So Which is More Important, Onsite or Offsite?
Especially when just launching, people sometimes want to know where it is most important to focus their energy. They don’t have time to do everything, so where is the best place to priortize: onsite or offsite?
It shouldn’t surprise that there is no right or wrong answer to that question, especially since we just discussed how closely related the two are, and there are a couple of perspectives on that notion.
First, there is the venerable idea that “content is king” – strong content trumps all, and that if you simply put enough good stuff up, search engines will recognize it and audiences will start to gather. While this isn’t necessarily false, there are plenty of other things that search engines factor into the equation, some of we wil get into more when we discuss the post-Panda and Penguin world. The fact of the matter is that while good content is the best way to convince audiences to spend time on your site, it may not be the best way to draw them in initially.
In actuality, though, what we have seen historically is that offsite SEO is more important to a site’s rank than content. This has been shifting lately, but offsite efforts still remain crucial. When you think about it, the logic makes sense. People spend so much time on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and reading feeds in their RSS readers that they’re not spending as much time out searching for content. In the early days of the Web, we all had to go out and find what we were looking for. Now, so much content comes to us that people don’t have to do that.
Those are essentially the two lines of thinking on the relative importance of onsite and offsite. In actuality, we know that no SEO strategy can succeed without at least some focus on both branches of the tree. A blog with great content but no networking outside of the site will fail just as spectacularly as one with a massive offsite effort in the online community, but no content to keep people interested.
Those are the two essential major components of an effective SEO strategy, but in the world of new and complex search engine ranking algorithms like Panda and Penguin, what considerations do we have to make when developing a strategy? How does this new technology affect our approach with High Traffic Academy? That’s the focus.
Let’s get started. Let me show you how I get 100,000 unique targeted visitors to my website per day and earn as much at $48,333 in just one week - click here to check it out.
Onsite SEO refers to anything on your own site (or blog) to improves its ranking in search engine results. This is what most people think of when they think about SEO, and usually they are focusing on keywords. However, there are many other components of a site that contribute to onsite SEO, including:
- Page titles
- Images with alt tags
- Site structure and hierarchy
Each of these things are seen and indexed by Google and the other search engines out there, and so they can all be optimized to improve your site’s page rank and visibility. There are other pieces of onsite SEO, and we’ll get to that whole topic in more depth later on.
By contrast, offsite SEO refers to anything that contributes to your site’s rank in search results, but is not part of your site or blog itself. That may seem like it doesn’t make sense at first blush, since we generally only think about page ranks in terms of our content and site structure, but offsite these offsite factors have actually historically been more important to site rank than content. Some examples of offsite SEO include:
- Forum comments with backlinks
- Social media mentions – retweets, Facebook “likes,” Google+ “+1′s,” Digg entries, etc.
- Incoming backlinks from other sites and blogs
- Offsite SEO at work.
All these offsite SEO components — Twitter feeds, forum posts and the like – are indexed by Google and other search engines, so more mentions of your stuff mean more opportunities for your site to crop up in search results.
There are some parts of offsite SEO that are inherently out of your hands – you can’t control whether someone retweets your link – but there are still plenty of things you can do to both directly and indirectly make offsite SEO work for you. Posting in relevant forms with links back to your site is a direct strategy to boost offsite SEO. Participating in social media conversations and boosting your following can indirectly bolster your offsite SEO, since it makes it more likely that others will share your content.
Using backlinks in forum posts can directly booster your offsite SEO.
The Relationship Between Onsite & Offsite SEO
You may be starting to see now that neither branch of the SEO tree exists in a vacuum. They are linked to one another, and by making a bigger effort in one area, you can get benefits in another.
When you bolster your onsite SEO by keeping up with fresh content, using alt tags in images, optimizing your page titles and all the other SEO tricks in the book, audiences are able to find your site more readily. That’s the whole point, right? Well, when people discover content that they like and that grabs their attention, they share it. They link it on their Facebook walls, they retweet it, the post it in forums and they tell their friends about it. Hence, focusing on your onsite SEO postively influences your offsite SEO.
In the reverse, when you stay active in the online community by engaging in forum conversations, keeping your Facebook profile up to date and tweeting links to your fresh content, you bolster your online presence and make yourself easier to find. People start to find your site and spend some time there, which helps your onsite SEO. Google and other search engines take into account the amount of time people spend on your site, and that boosts page rank. Just like that, your offsite SEO efforts have enhanced those onsite.
So Which is More Important, Onsite or Offsite?
Especially when just launching, people sometimes want to know where it is most important to focus their energy. They don’t have time to do everything, so where is the best place to priortize: onsite or offsite?
It shouldn’t surprise that there is no right or wrong answer to that question, especially since we just discussed how closely related the two are, and there are a couple of perspectives on that notion.
First, there is the venerable idea that “content is king” – strong content trumps all, and that if you simply put enough good stuff up, search engines will recognize it and audiences will start to gather. While this isn’t necessarily false, there are plenty of other things that search engines factor into the equation, some of we wil get into more when we discuss the post-Panda and Penguin world. The fact of the matter is that while good content is the best way to convince audiences to spend time on your site, it may not be the best way to draw them in initially.
In actuality, though, what we have seen historically is that offsite SEO is more important to a site’s rank than content. This has been shifting lately, but offsite efforts still remain crucial. When you think about it, the logic makes sense. People spend so much time on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and reading feeds in their RSS readers that they’re not spending as much time out searching for content. In the early days of the Web, we all had to go out and find what we were looking for. Now, so much content comes to us that people don’t have to do that.
Those are essentially the two lines of thinking on the relative importance of onsite and offsite. In actuality, we know that no SEO strategy can succeed without at least some focus on both branches of the tree. A blog with great content but no networking outside of the site will fail just as spectacularly as one with a massive offsite effort in the online community, but no content to keep people interested.
Those are the two essential major components of an effective SEO strategy, but in the world of new and complex search engine ranking algorithms like Panda and Penguin, what considerations do we have to make when developing a strategy? How does this new technology affect our approach with High Traffic Academy? That’s the focus.
Let’s get started. Let me show you how I get 100,000 unique targeted visitors to my website per day and earn as much at $48,333 in just one week - click here to check it out.