On-Site vs Off-Site SEO: Getting the Balance Right

It’s very often the case that the focus of SEO is too much on the technical aspects of on-site optimisation or too much on the content-based approach to off-site SEO so it’s worth spending time to dispel the myths and to help you build a plan for balancing both. What is On-Site SEO? On-site SEO is to do with getting your house in order; it’s optimising your ‘owned’ assets; it’s about maximising what you have easy control over and minimising missed opportunities from what could be called ‘quick wins’. On-site SEO is specifically to do with ensuring search terms – words, phrases, topics & themes – are included in the various tags and content on your site. It’s not about keyword stuffing, doorway pages and hidden text as was the case way back when, but it reflects your opportunity to respond to the queries that your potential customers use in search engines by organising your content in a way that reflects this intention. On-site SEO can be seen as a prioritised checklist as there are certain factors that are more important than others, but it’s important to understand how clever search engines are trying to be and organise your content based on great user experience. A site that has no consideration for breaking content up to make it readable and manageable is unlikely to succeed when it comes to both humans and machine readers understanding that content. On-site SEO should follow an ordered process of research. ThinkSearch always follow the following plan: Technical SEO Audit – what impediments are there to SEO success Search Term Research – what are those words, phrases, themes & topics relevant to your audience? Page Allocation – which pages do you have relevant to these topics (and which are missing)? Meta Data Inventory – apply latest, best practice optimisation to Page Titles & Meta Descriptions Site-Wide Optimisation – a guide to optimising the rest of the content, links, images & other assets on the site The general order of priorities for optimisation of each page on the website is as follows: Page Titles – the 70 character blue hyperlink in Google and the test in the tab in the browser chrome Headings – H1, H2 & H3 should be used if the page content can be structured this way Body copy – is it clear, concise and well structured to represent the themes and topics of the page Links...