The Complete Guide to On-Page and Off-Page SEO

No wonder whether millions of people Google the term “SEO” each month but it’s all of that and more.

SEO stands for search engine optimization. This is the art of ranking high on a search engine like Google, Yahoo in the unpaid section. This is known as the organic listings also.

Search engine optimization or SEO which is the process to improve the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO mainly targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic.

There are two broad categories of SEO i.e. on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing each web pages in order to rank higher on search engines and earn more relevant traffic. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized.

Off-page SEO or Off-site SEO both refers to actions which is taken outside of your own site to impact your rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs).

Preliminary SEO Analysis

Doing an SEO analysis is the key to making smart, updated, informed decisions about how to improve your website’s search engine optimization.

Tools for SEO Analysis:

https://www.seoptimer.com/www.example.com
https://seositecheckup.com/analysis
https://www.seobility.net/en/seocheck/
https://sitechecker.pro/
https://gtmetrix.com/

Domain Rating (DR): This shows the strength of a website’s backlink profile by comparing to the others in database on a 100-point scale.

Check here: https://ahrefs.com/website-authority-checker

Domain Authority (DA): It is a search engine ranking score which gives a measure of how popular or successful a website is when it comes to search engine results.

Check here: https://checkpagerank.net/

Page Authority (PA): It is a score developed by Moz Company which determines how well a particular page will rank on search engine result pages i.e. SERPs.

Website Performance Testing and Monitoring:

Here is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide that you can take also.

Let’s take a look of each techniques.

List of On-Page SEO Techniques:

Title Tag Optimization

Title tag is the first thing that your user sees when they enter a search query on search engine. So, this is important to give your user an idea about what they can expect from your content.

Best practices:

Get the Length Right (60-70 characters)
Unique Title
Right Keywords
Use Your Business/Brand Name

Meta Description Tag

A meta description is an attribute within your meta tags which helps to describe your page.

Characteristics of a good meta description:

Keep it up to 155 characters
Use active voice and make it actionable
Include a call-to-action
Use your focus keyword
Show specifications
Match the content of the page
Make it unique

XML Sitemap

A organized XML sitemap works as a roadmap of your website which leads Google to all your important pages. It is good for SEO, as they allow Google to find your essential pages very quickly, even if your internal linking isn’t perfect.

Add a Sitemap to Google Search Console:
1. Find your sitemap page on your live site.
2. Go to Google Search Console account and locate your correct property.
3. Navigate to “Sitemaps” under “Index” on the left site navigation pane.
4. Under “Add a new sitemap” you can add your sitemap URL and click submit.
5. Google will verify that the sitemap can be found and read.

Best Sitemap Plugins for WordPress:
1. Yoast SEO
2. Google XML Sitemaps
3. All in One SEO Pack
4. Jetpack
5. BestWebSoft

You can check Yahoo Site Map and ROR Site Map also.

HTML Site Map

A HTML Site Map guides your website users to where they want to go. It is where they want to go if they haven’t found what they are looking from the dropdown menus.

RSS Feed Creation

By RSS Builder application, you can create a new feed by giving it a title, description and URL to your website.

Optimizing Image ALT Tag

Every image should have an alt text. It is not only for SEO purposes, but also to tell what the image is about.

This is a complete HTML image tag:

Image Alt Tag Checker:

https://www.seoptimer.com/alt-tag-checker
https://w3seotools.com/image-alt-tags-checker/

Robot.txt File Optimization

The robots.txt file, also known as the robots exclusion protocol on search engine or standard, is a text file that tells web robots (most often search engines) which pages on your site to crawl and which pages not to crawl.

Submit your updated robots.txt to Google:
1. Go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/robots-testing-tool
2. Choose the Property
3. Paste robots.txt file content
4. Now Submit to notify Google that changes have been made to your robots.txt file and request to crawl it.

Fixing Canonical Issue (301 Redirection)

Canonical issues caused by duplicate content. This is a really common SEO problem for websites. This issues most commonly occur when a website has more than one URL which displays similar or identical content.

How to Fix Common Canonical Issues:
1. Implement Sitewide 301 Redirects for Duplicate Pages
2. Add Canonical Tags to All of Your Site’s Pages

Data Highlighting

Data Highlighter is a webmaster tool by Google for teaching Google about the pattern of structured data on your website.

How to use:
1. Open https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/data-highlighter?siteUrl=https://www.example.com/
2. Click Start Highlighting
3. Enter URL
4. Choose Content Type and Submit

Fixing Broken Links

Broken links are the links that don’t work.

Google Analytics is a free tool for easily finding broken links.

Steps:
1. First, log into your Google Analytics account and click on the Behavior tab.
2. Select “Site Content” and then “All Pages”
3. Scroll down, you’ll see viewing options. Default is “Page,” but be sure to select “Page Title.”
4. Click on the “advanced” option
5. In the “advanced” window, set up your filtering to Include > Page Title > Containing > “404 Page”
6. Click “Apply”
7. You will then see the links that are broken.

Some broken link checker:
1. https://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/
2. https://ahrefs.com/broken-link-checker
3. https://wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker/

404 Custom Error Page

A 404 page is what an end user sees when they try to visit a non-existent page on your site. A good custom 404 page helps user to find the information they’re looking for and you can also provide other helpful content that encourages people to explore your site further.

Header Tags

Header tags make it easier for web crawlers to determine the relevance of your web site content.

Robots Meta Tag

A robots meta tag is an HTML tag that informs search engines how to crawl or index a particular page. This is placed into the <head> section of a web page, and looks like this:

Google Webmaster / Google Search Console

Google Search Console or Google Webmaster is a web service owned by Google that allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of websites.

Quality content

Quality Content Provides Great User Experience. Quality content achieves a goal i.e. drives traffic, Google search rankings, engagement, or conversions. Use plagiarism checker to check duplicate content.

Alexa Code

Alexa rank is a measure of website popularity.

After login to Alexa, go to your Site Settings. Click the “Certification Status” link. Below are the directions to add an Alexa certify code to each and every page of your website.

Benefits of Alexa Certified Metrics:
1. Count 100% Of Your Real Traffic
2. A More Accurate Alexa Rank
3. Better Analytics Reports
4. Monitor Your Site’s Performance
5. Publish Your Metrics to Boost Advertising Revenue

Geo Tag

GEO Tags are a basically a way of telling Search Engines that what physical region or location the serves.

For e.g. https://www.geo-tag.de/generator/en.html

Bing Webmaster Tool

Bing Webmaster Tools is a free service made by Microsoft’s Bing search engine that allows webmasters to add their websites to the Bing index crawler.

Google Analytics Configuration

Google Analytics is a web analytics service made by Google which tracks and reports website traffic.

Internal Links and Outbound Links

Internal links in SEO are hyperlinks which direct the reader to a target internal pages, whereas an external link in SEO is a hyperlink that directs the reader to a reputable page on a different website. This boost rankings in Google’s search algorithm.

Image Optimization

Images bring an content to life and also contribute to your website’s SEO. Image alt tags help SEO.

For e.g. https://tinypng.com/, https://tinyjpg.com/ etc.

WordPress Plugins:

Optimized Page

An Ideally Optimized Web Page can help content to be easily discoverable by search engine.

Optimization Of HTML Source Code

If code optimization done on your website then this will ensure that all of the relevant pages of your site are properly indexed by search engine.

WordPress Plugins:

Author Tag

Author tag is used to name the author of the page for a give article.

Structured Schema Markup

This is a system of key-value pair which helps search engines to categorize and index your content.

Click here to test using Google Structured Data Testing Tool.

Optimizing Keyword Rich Footer Paragraph/Links and Breadcrumbs Navigation

Breadcrumbs make navigation easier. This encourage people to visit more pages of a website. Footer Paragraph can give a nice boost to search engine optimization for your site. Footer links are links which appear on every page of a website. Internal links are more safe to place within your website footer.

URL Mapping

You should remove words which does not add significance to the URL. Mapping process can make your page more relevant to the mapped keywords.

URL Structure for SEO:
1. Remove Extra Words
2. Relevant Keywords
3. Easily Readable
4. Utilize Hyphens and Underscores
5. Single Domain and Subdomain
6. Canonicalize When Possible
7. Exclude Dynamic Parameters
8. Match URLs and Titles
9. Remove Unnecessary Punctuation
10. Limit Folders
11. Restrict Redirection
12. Case Sensitivity
13. Avoid Keyword Stuffing
14. Using Tracking Parameters
15. Shorter is Better
16. Home Page URL
17. Paginated URLs

Keyword Analysis

This is an important skill for both SEO and PPC experts. This is for better customizing content and landing pages to drive more traffic from search engines and increase conversion rates.

For e.g. https://ads.google.com/intl/en_in/home/tools/keyword-planner/

Fix Any Missing or Duplicate Meta Tags

Each website URL should have unique meta tags so this is very important to fix as soon as you found Unique URLs with duplicate meta tags.

List of Off-Page SEO Techeniques:

Blog commenting

This is defined as a simple strategy to start link building back to your site and building strong relationships with the people in your industry. In seo it is the process of posting comments on webpages with a link back to your site.

Business Directory Submission

It is a practice of submitting website URL and its details on the web in a directory under a particular category. It is a way which helps us to improve link building.

Press Release Submission

This is writing about new events of your business, products or services of the company and submitting it to PR sites. It is a great way to build one-way, permanent links back to our website.

Forum Posting

Forum Posting refers to generate quality inbound links by participating in online discussion forums. It is an important role in off page submission of SEO.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a online service which allows end users to add, edit, and share bookmarks of web related documents.

Are you looking for social bookmarking site list to build backlinks for your blog or website? Click here.

Popular social bookmarking websites

Twitter.
Pinterest.
StumbleUpon.
Dribble.
Pocket.
Digg.
Reddit.
Slashdot.

Blog Promotion

Focusing on improving organic SEO can help your blog promotion and eventually lead more users to your website.

Build Brand Pages

You can build a brand page for your busienss or website to measure your brand’s online influence. Add brand badge on your website to increase customers’ trustworthiness.

For e.g. https://www.apsense.com/bmc/start

Image Submission

Image submission in SEO is leaving images related to your website in different image sharing sites. Popular image sharing sites include Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr, Twitter, Flickr and Instagram.

Mobile Responsive

Mobile SEO is the process of optimizing your website to ensure that your site looks great and functions properly on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

Classified AD Posting

This is basically a process in which you can submit ads related to your website in classified submission sites. This also enhance your visibility and presence in the search engine.

Unique Article Posting / Blog Posts on Website

This is an effective off-page SEO technique. With article submission to other website, one can gain traffic on their websites to your website.

Manual Search Engine Submission / Local Search Engine Submission

It is very important to remember that Google isn’t the only one search engine, and you want to submit to other popular search engines also which people use like Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Yandex and Baido etc.

Social Media Marketings / Social Media Engagement

Social Media Can Improve Your SEO Results and Google search rankings.

Best Social Media Websites for SEO:
1. LinkedIn
2. Medium
3. Facebook
4. Twitter
5. Pinterest
6. Quora
7. Instagram

Best Practices For Increasing SEO Rankings:
1. Publish High-Quality Content
2. Make Sharing Your Content
3. Optimize Your Social Media Profiles
4. Optimize Your Images
5. Make Relationships Through Active Conversations
6. Evaluate Your SMM Operations

For e.g. getting Facebook organic page likes/fans, engagement with LinkedIn company page or profile page, Twitter tweets with followers etc can increase traffic on your website. Join Multiple Groups on multiple social channels and share on those groups also. Share your content in the various Social Media Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn etc.

Build Relationships with Webmasters/Influencers

Start connecting with Webmasters/Influencers, impress them enough to make them share your blog content and thus you can build some quality relationships. Be Present On the Web.

RSS Feed submission

This indirectly helps in SEO. It allows us to be notified when a web site has been updated. By submitting the RSS feed to multiple directories, you need to provide different way for your blog to get syndicated and to distribute your backlinks.

Web 2.0 Submission

Web 2.0 websites are for all high DA (authority) with dofollow backlinks.

PPT Submission

PowerPoint presentation plays an important role in SEO. PPT or PowerPoint submission is one of online marketing tool that help to get backlinks. For e.g. SlideShare.

Resource Page Link Building

A resource page in a website is simply a page on a that lists helpful resource links and resource for a particular topic.

Social Media Profile Keyword Optimization

Social media optimization or SMO can benefit your business in more than one way. This can increase your online presence and make your business or brand more known.

Question and Answer

One of the best ways you can get high website traffic is from question and answer websites.

Question and Answer Websites:
1. https://www.quora.com/
2. https://answers.yahoo.com/
3. http://www.ehow.com/

Video Submission

If you have videos related to your content, head to popular video submission sites like youtube.com and vimeo.com.

Infographics Submission

Submit your content related infographics on infographics submission websites and in return give reference links to your website or blog.

Google My Business

For best local SEO ranking, you can use Google My Business.

In conclusion, well organized On-page and Off page SEO optimization can make your website to a better position in SERP.

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