If you want customers to discover your website in 2021, you need more than a great website. You need to master SEO and make sure your website is ranking well on Google.
But with so much competition, how do you optimize your website to rank on page 1? First, you need to know the importance of onsite vs. offsite SEO and why both matter in the race to the ranking top spots.
Here, you’ll learn the difference between offsite and onsite SEO and how to optimize both for your website.
Onsite SEO
Onsite SEO is about everything you do on your website to ensure it is well-optimized. Search engines will crawl your website to determine the rank, so the content must be search engine friendly. This is your on-page SEO.
Onsite SEO starts with optimizing metadata on your website, such as titles, descriptions, and image alt tags. When you optimize this data for your main keyword, that will help you rank well for that keyword on Google.
Of course, what you select as your preferred keyword is also a critical part of onsite SEO. A good keyword must be relevant to your content. For most businesses, you’ll want to avoid choosing the most competitive keywords.
Onsite SEO is also about the quality of your content. That means creating meaningful, in-depth content that is relevant to your keywords.
The other aspect of online SEO is technical. These factors include site speed or site security that Google uses to determine if you are a good quality site that it should list high in the search rankings.
If you need help understanding how your onsite SEO is currently performing, you can hire experts to conduct an audit. For example on site SEO can be done here.
Offsite SEO
Offsite SEO is all about everything external to your website that will help you rank on Google. Offsite is about your reputation, and building up your reputation online will help you with your long-term keyword rankings.
That reputation starts with backlinks. When other sites refer to your content with a link, that counts as a backlink. The more reputable that website is, the higher Google will value that backlink.
Reputation comes with age and website quality, and in SEO terms, this is known as the DA (Domain Authority). So the most well-known websites around the world, such as CNN or The New York Times, will have a high DA.
Of course, you don’t have to depend on websites to discover you and link to you if you want to improve your offsite SEO. You can be proactive by writing guest posts on websites with a high DA score.
Tracking Offsite and Onsite SEO to Rank In 2021
Getting your offsite SEO up to speed with quality backlinks is only half the battle if you want to rank in 2021. You need to assess the quality of your website and ensure your onsite SEO is just as good.
Want more SEO tips? Read through our most popular blog posts for more advice on how to rank on Google.