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On Page vs. Off Page Optimization
The debate rages on as to which one reigns supreme: on-page optimization or off-page optimization. To be fair, both are vital to long term SEO success. For a competitive keyword, both optimization techniques are necessary for success and are highly recommended for a keyword even if not as competitive at the time.
On page optimization takes into account everything you can physically do to change your website (be it in the design or in the backend code that nobody sees). This includes strategies like altering a title tag, updating the meta keywords tag, or even changing the actual text on the webpage that everyone can see. As a rule, if you have to upload your website to your host as a result of any SEO you have done to your website, you have made on page SEO changes.
Whereas on page optimization is more hands on in terms of what you personally are doing, off page optimization takes into account what others are doing relative to your website. As you may very well know, a big part of your search engine ranking involves your link popularity – in essence, how many related sites are linking to yours because of the quality of your material. Each link from an external website to yours is seen as a “vote” by the search engines, and the more votes your website gets, the more likely you are to bump your ranking up for particular search terms.
While you can change on-page factors as often and as easily as you’d like, off-page changes are not decided by you. The most you can hope for is that other websites appreciate your web efforts and publicly acknowledge this by linking to your site. Often, websites will coax other sites into linking to theirs via “link bait” – material to entice websites to link to the link baiting website. A professional SEO can help with producing link bait for a site, eventually helping to improve the site’s link popularity. Ultimately, websites will find that the best link bait is overall quality content from a quality site. In short, good sites will be linked to.
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