Before we jump into explaining on-site and off-site SEO, it's important to understand exactly what we mean by the term "search engine optimisation" or SEO.

SEO is the process of improving a website or web page’s visibility in what’s called the ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ search engine results. It does not involve the use of paid ads like Google Adwords, which appear in the sponsors links of Google's search results. SEO works by demonstrating to the search engines that a website or page is not only relevant, but an authority for particular keywords.

The goal of these SEO processes and techniques is to increase visitors to your business website by appearing on the first page of Google for targeted keywords. Some of these processes happen over time, such as adding new content, but it’s critical that others are implemented as early as possible.

Now, what’s the difference between on-site SEO and off-site SEO?

On-site SEO Explained

On-site SEO refers to everything you can do on your website to improve its SEO and therefore, its Google ranking. In order for a website or web page to be considered deserving of a higher search engine ranking, it has to tick a number of boxes, some of which are quite complicated for the inexperienced. They include Google friendly code and layouts, meta descriptions, title tags, SEF URLs and so on.

DIY On-site SEO

Where you can assist in your website’s on-site SEO is in the practice of adding new content, relevant to the targeted keywords, and adding internal links within the site itself. Keep your keywords in mind when writing website content for search engine ranking, but make sure it's humanly readable with correct spelling and grammar. A great example is writing a blog post about a topic relevant to your product or service. This additional website content contributes to your ranking. Including a link to the product page improves your product pages authority on the subject. Please no ‘click here’ links! Use your keywords.

Depending on your technical experience, and content management system you can do more by including your keywords in meta descriptions, <h1-6> heading tags <ALT> image tags. If your website does not have a CMS, you need to talk to us urgently!

Off-site SEO Explained

Everything that happens on the Internet away from your business website that links back to your website affects off-site SEO. What you need here is effective back-links from other websites and blogs. Each link from an external website to your site passes an amount of "link juice" or "page rank". As the amount of external references to your business website grows, more and more page rank is passed to your website, and in turn, you achieve higher Google rankings. Again the maximum results are achieved from links using your keywords in the anchor text.

DIY Offsite SEO

DIY Off-site SEO can be quite hit and miss. I say this because there are many factors which influence the value of a back-link. Essential DIY Off-site SEO is making sure you focus on one way back links, from pages with readable well written content. Reciprocal linking, or link exchanges, are the practice of linking to a site for a back-link to your site.  This is less effective than one way back-link, and could even be damaging if linking to "bad neigbourhoods".

Get help with your Search Engine Optimisation

Of course, aside from the DIY SEO that you as a business website owner can perform, there are professional techniques offered with SEO packages to get you well ahead of the competition. If you've already started improving your Google ranking, or you’re not experienced with SEO techniques, you will see a massive improvement from the tools, experience and network of a high quality SEO business.