Onsite Vs. Offsite SEO
When it comes to your search engine optimization, you have two options: onsite seo and offsite seo. While they’re both effective, they both also contain different tactics. Some people swear by onsite seo. Some people swear by offsite seo. And some people swear that you have to implement a solid combination of both. So in terms of your own SEO efforts, which strategy is more valuable?
A Look Inside Onsite SEO
Onsite SEO typically refers to the SEO tactics that you implement on your own site. This includes creating keyword-rich text; adding meta tags and descriptions to your multimedia files, web pages, etc.; and ensuring the overall structure of your website is intact.
In order to implement onsite SEO, also called on-page SEO, you first need to determine the best possible keywords for your site. This is usually done with the help of a keyword tool, and once you have a list of the best keywords for your specific content and topics, you need to naturally add it into your text. Search engines will crawl through your site looking for those keywords in order to determine how to best rank your site.
Once your keyword-rich content is in place, you need to add those keywords to the tags and descriptions of your web pages, URLs and multimedia files. Search engines can crawl through the tags and descriptions of these items and use it to better rank your site. If you have a blog or add articles to your website, it’s important that you also add keywords to the titles of those as well.
If you have multimedia files on your website, you should also consider adding transcriptions of these items to your site as well. Audio and video transcription adds to your site content while also improving your SEO. Search engines may not be able to crawl through the actual multimedia file, but they can crawl through the transcription, so that transcription can add more beneficial keywords to your site.
A Look Inside Offsite SEO
Offsite SEO refers to the SEO tactics that are implemented outside of your own website. These tactics typically include link building and social media. Link building and social media are extremely important to your SEO, but since you have no control over them, it’s hard to ensure that they will work the way you want them to.
Link building requires you to get links back to your website through other sites, and the more respectable the website, the better success the link building will have. For example, if your website receives links back from popular websites like Huffington Post, it will be better for the SEO of your site.
While you can’t necessarily control who links back to your site, you can generate your own backlinks by guest posting on blogs and pushing your own content out through social media. This will give you a better opportunity of earning some valuable backlinks and increasing the success of your SEO.
So What’s More Valuable? Offsite SEO or Onsite SEO?
Both onsite and offsite SEO have their benefits, and it’s important for your SEO strategy to implement both. However, if your time or budget only allows you to put an emphasis on one, you need to decide the right option for you. Onsite SEO is definitely the easier of the two options to implement because you are in complete control. You have access to the content on your own website and the tags of your multimedia files, so if you’re looking for a quick SEO strategy, onsite SEO is the option to choose. However, SEO is an ever-changing strategy, and once you’ve implemented the onsite SEO tactics, there’s not much else for you to do besides constantly change your content. While pushing links out through social media and earning backlinks on guest blogs, you can continue to increase your reach and boost your SEO, but this is more time consuming. Ultimately, the choice for your SEO strategy is up to you.
Meyling Lau is a partner at SEOMap.com and has lead enterprise scale SEO programs. Formerly, Mey led a variety of grassroots marketing projects for Hotels.com.
