Two Schools of SEO: Onsite vs. Offsite

Posted on Dec 06 at 11:34 am

by admin

SEO is a confusing and many-headed beast, much like the ancient Hydras of lore, or Joan Rivers. Essentially there are two primary ways to impact your site’s search engine rankings. They are:

1) Onsite SEO

2) Offsite SEO

What’s the difference? Is your site doing one well at the expense of the other? Let’s break them down and try to figure it out.

ONSITE SEO

When we talk about onsite optimizations at L2TMedia, we’re covering everything from the words that appear on your website to the code that goes into your site’s HTML.

In short, onsite SEO is all about informing Google’s robot spiders (the little bits of code Google uses to crawl the web and collect information) what your site is about. For example, naturally mention you’re a “BMW dealer,” both in the written content on a webpage and in things like your site page title, and Google will take the hint. Don’t try to force the issue, though. If there’s one thing these robot spiders hate, it’s David Bowie’s 80s period. And if there’s another, it’s obvious attempts to manipulate Google search rankings!

One of the main challenges with onsite SEO is recognizing that what a Google robot spider sees is not what a human like you, me, or Owen Wilson would see.

Google’s spiders can crawl things like text, or links, but they will not acknowledge that a Flash element on your site provides any search value. For businesses, this means striking a balance between giving your users a positive website experience, and maintaining SEO value. The two aspects should work in conjunction – great SEO value and a terrible site experience will lead to visitors leaving, whereas a nifty site experience without any thought about SEO can prevent visitors from finding you in the first place.

What’s the secret to onsite SEO? Is it page titles? Meta data? Keyword density? The answer, as always, is a little bit more complicated and involves elements of all the SEO tricks you’ll hear about. The main “trick” is to put together a great website with logical information that’s helpful to your visitors. It’s easier to frame all that within a useful SEO setting from there.

OFFSITE SEO

For the most part, offsite SEO is going to refer to link-building. This is an increasingly tricky field, as Google updates like Penguin and Panda have made link-building much harder.

This does not mean recent Google updates have diminished the value of links in general. From a search engine’s perspective, the sites that link to your website indicate they value the information on your site. In a lot of ways, it’s like a positive testimonial from a happy client. The link to your site is equivalent to someone saying “They get my vote!”

The challenge for SEO teams then is finding where the voters are, and whether or not they’re quality individuals. If a site will give their link to anyone, Google’s going to call them a no-good floozy and diminish the value of that link.

At L2TMedia, our link-building specialists spend time finding the relevant sources from a client’s local area. These are the kinds of links that can actually mean something for a local car dealer, and Google is more likely to recognize them as such.

The final point on link-building is this: if any SEO agency comes to you and says they can get you thousands of links for specific, exact-match keywords in a short period of time? Run. Run like the Dickens (could Dickens run? Is that where that comes from? Is that what happened to Tiny Tim? Too much running? Plantar Fasciitis? We may never know).

Nothing could be more foolish right now than to engage in link-building that screams to Google “We want to trick you for the following keywords!” Google and the other search engines still encourage SEO and natural, fluid link-building. But paying for huge bulk links is a very risky proposition, and not one we recommend at L2T.

End of the day, both onsite and offsite SEO are required for a successful search engine optimization campaign. They’re getting increasingly complex as Google advances, so if you’d like to talk to someone at L2T about your search needs, contact us here.