On-site SEO and off-site SEO, what does that mean? Explanation by Esokia

Recently, we wrote about the importance of working with an SEO agency if you do not know SEO techniques. SEO and its good optimization are not invented. On the other hand, they are explained and learned. For beginners of SEO, two terms are important to remember: on-site and off-site. They combine all the SEO optimizations to work on a website. Explanations by our digital marketing professionals.

 

The on-site, work on your website

The on-site SEO corresponds to all the optimizations made at the level of a website and its content. It includes two types of optimizations that improve the indexing of a website and its positioning in search engines:  technical SEO and on-page SEO. As the name suggests, the technical SEO are technical actions that are independent of the website’s content. For example, we include in technical SEO, the work on:

• The robots.txt file and the sitemap.xml which allow search engines to index the website and all its pages more easily,
• The time it takes to load the website which, if it is slow, could hinder robots in the crawl of the website and scare off Internet users,
• The responsive design and mobile compatibility of the website which are now criteria taken into account by Google for a good SEO,
• Etc.

Technical optimizations often require one or more developers to work on the website structure. Knowledge of programming languages is essential here.

On the other hand, the on-page SEO focuses on the content of the website, i.e. what appears on the pages of the website (visible but also in the code). Many on-page optimization criteria exist, of which here are some examples:

• The title tag,
• The meta description,
• Hn tags,
• ALT attributes,
• Writing URLs,
• Etc.

Fortunately, many CMS like WordPress and Drupal provide specific fields in their back-office to make it easier to fill in the SEO on-site elements. Here, it is rare to have to call a developer.

 

The off-site, work of backlinks

 

Also known as off-page SEO, the off-site is focused on off-page optimizations of the website, and mainly on the search for backlinks. What is a backlink? This is an external link - present on another website - to a page on your site. The backlinks thus promote traffic to the website,  but are also a central element for search engine positioning and Google in particular. Backlinks play on the popularity of a site and are taken into account by search engines in their indexing criteria.

The off-site SEO is therefore closely related to on-site SEO and website content. Getting backlinks is called netlinking. It can be built in several ways. The best, and recommended by search engines, is the natural obtaining of backlinks: another website will have liked your content and chosen to make a link from its site to yours. But with competition becoming tougher, practices tend to be more risky. Some of them buy backlinks in quantity, others buy comment spam, etc.  But nowadays, search engines favour quality over quantity. A backlink should therefore, if possible, be natural and not over-optimized (presence of the keyword in the link for example). 

Although poorly viewed by Google, it is still possible to make an exchange of links by proposing the publication of a link on its website against a link on the other site. However, be careful of penalties if search engines spot your game. The off-site SEO is therefore an extremely long job. It requires you to have quality content, but also to contact influencers and bloggers to let them know about your website and invite them to publish backlinks to it. The majority of SEO agencies now include netlinking in their services. Through their network of contacts, they have more facilities than an individual. 

If you want to optimize your search engine optimization, SEO, we invite you to contact us to discuss on the topic and the best strategy to adopt. Esokia carries out a first audit of your site and you then choose to continue optimizations or not.