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When you are focusing on launching a comprehensive search engine optimization strategy to generate new leads for your business, one of the questions that you will run across is that of on-site vs. off-site SEO. If this sounds foreign to you, read more to get an idea of both of these important concepts. If you already know about both of these strategies and are trying to figure out which you need to focus more on, we provide you with that information below.
The short answer? The best SEO strategy involves a calculated mix of on-site and off-site SEO in order to capture as much of the traffic share as possible for your target keywords. Working with a company that specializes in Tampa SEO services is one of the best decisions that you can make if you have decided to introduce this type of marketing effort into your business, since this question is one of the thousands that you will need to answer in order to build an effective strategy that provides continuous results.
What Is On-site SEO?
On-site SEO is likely the first type of SEO that you think of when you start considering an SEO strategy. This area of search engine optimization applies to the content that you put on your own website, providing your visitors with useful and engaging information at the same time that you are sending signals to the search engine crawlers that you are a trusted source for the subject of your target keywords.
Your focus with on-site SEO is on utilizing the appropriate keywords to help boost your search engine rankings in your industry, as well as creating content that is highly specific to your business and the questions that your visitors are hoping to answer by visiting your site. In addition, you will need to go through your site and make sure that all of your tags, titles, and the overall structure of your website are designed with SEO as your specific target. All of this work is done through your site management system or content management system and is entirely up to you or your website manager.
While all areas of SEO require a significant amount of work and attention, on-site SEO is the easier of the two, since you are the one who is managing your site, writing your content, and then posting it directly to your website or blog. This is an imperative focus of an SEO campaign, but is it enough?
What Is Off-site SEO?
Off-site SEO is an important strategy for a variety of reasons, namely because major search engines want to point their traffic towards sites that illustrate collaborative behavior and contribute to a more-connected internet. When other trusted sites provide their visitors with links to your site, search engines see this as an indication that other authorities in your industry respect you and trust that their visitors will receive the support that they expect when leaving their page and visiting yours.
How To Generate Off-site Links
These types of links are known as “backlinks” in the industry, and there are a few ways that you can include this strategy into your overall SEO efforts. The first is to write SEO-optimized press releases that point back to your site, and have those releases published with press release-centric publications that will make the release available to news networks. Each time your press release is shared to another news site, your links will appear on another trusted news site and direct traffic back to your page.
The other way to generate off-site links that point back to your URL is by writing guest posts for other industry leaders. This can seem like a daunting task because it requires ongoing outreach and managing of relationships so that you can supply a steady flow of guest blog posts for major sites that will help them (by getting additional content for their visitors) and you (by pointing links back to your site). You can learn more about backlinks at backlink-masters.net.
How NOT To Generate Off-site Links
In years past, black hat SEO specialists would create massive indexes of links and bury them in other websites in order to trick search engines into believing that there was high inbound demand for their client’s site. These days, the search engines can spot these black hat practices instantly, and the site will pay a heavy price for this sort of behavior. Unfortunately, there are still SEO “specialists” who offer incredible results for low costs, and they typically employ these sorts of tactics that will lead to a quick boost and then a steep drop, by which time they have cashed your check and disappeared into the internet.
So Which Is More Important: On-site or Off-site SEO?
If you were hoping that we were going to let you off the hook, think again. If you want to launch a comprehensive SEO strategy that consistently generates results, you need to put in the legwork. This includes both on-site and off-site SEO and giving ongoing attention to both. Simply writing a few blog posts for you or a partner site and then never writing anything again won’t keep you up in the rankings, so like any marketing effort, this will require your care and energy for as long as you want to keep capturing new traffic from search engine results.
