To fully optimise your site, people must be attracted to your site to then turn into a purchase. By using Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), this can utilise your resources to be fully optimising the potential that you could be running at. After fully completing your site to make sure each title, page, tags and content is linked to keywords (on-site SEO); to aim higher for yourself, you must focus on off-site SEO to be bale to optimise your website outside the actual website (Kloostra, 2015). There’s a short clip to explain the importance of SEO to your business. If the video does not play and you wish to watch it please click here.
How does on-site SEO help you?
Out of the two, on-site SEO is fairly straightforward compared to off-site SEO. There are a number of elements to an on-site SEO such as Crawler accessible, Authorship, meta data and rich snippets, social media network, keyword target, phenomenal UX and Unique value. Once you have come to an agreement of your chosen keywords that relate to your pages of your site then you will be able to craft your content to those keywords to fully optimise the potential of traffic coming to your pages (Lieberman, 2013).
The picture above shows the whole SEO process and how on-site and off-site process plays a critical role in the effectiveness of the SEO that you implement (Enge et al., 2012).
1. Unique Valuable –
An optimised page does not just mean that you provide ‘unique content’ but you offer ‘unique value’ that makes the customer want to stay and offer something ‘unique’ to the customer. Fishkin (2013) states the difference;
- ‘Unique content’ – means that the words you used (in that particular order) do not appear anywhere else.
- ‘Unique value’ – relates to the usefulness and what takeaways the visitor takes from using your page. These are values that can not be found or seen on any other pages on the web that make them unique to you.
This is why on-site optimisation is a key process to how the site is portrayed and how the site will be aimed to the right customer to be coming to your site. As if you have a site that portrays the level of ‘unique value’ offers to people then the rest will follow shortly after from social shares to positive word of mouth (Fishkin, 2013).
2. Social Media Sharing –
To fully optimise on-site SEO then the website has to be built to be shared through social media; each page and link has be operational to work alongside social media and be shared instantly through a click of the mouse. Social media has never been more important to the opportunities that it provides to people; especially recently as social shares correlate positively to higher rankings during search for company websites.
Social media profiles have shown they’re effective by boosting your SEO depending on the following in which you have on these profiles (DeMers, 2015). As a company with only 100 followers on a particular platform like Twitter will have significantly lower rankings compared to a company with over a million followers. This shows the importance of social media sharing operation on your pages to be fully optimising on-site SEO.
How does off-site SEO help you?
So off-site SEO is slightly trickier to succeed in as it involves using other pages and sites to link back to your own; this then improves your positions in the search engine results page (SERPs). This works alongside on-site SEO as you need the content to be ‘unique’ to the customer as this will aid you in more links to your site; People only cite, reference and share content they like (Matosevic, 2015). Without that on-site optimisation then your off-site will have no chance of succeeding.
These are two steps to help with off-page SEO;
1. Build a community on social networking sites –
To aid your site you should aim to build a community on your social media platforms; this will help you extend your social online network, connect with friends and share content with others. This can build your reputation of your site and company as there is a large audience providing positive ‘word of mouth’ to bring more traffic into your sit (Matthews, 2016).
2. Blogging
Blogging is a great way to improve your off-site SEO and the amount of quality inbound links to come to your site. A good technique is to guest blog which requires you to reach out to other blogs that your potential customers are already reading and speak to the editors and offer to write them regular blogs for them (Lieberman, 2013). This is a good chance to be able to write some good content and include links back to your site allowing more traffic to you own content.
To make this tactic successful you must post relevant and only useful, compelling and truly unique content to make readers want to continue to read your content and follow those links to your site. As Bannan (2009) suggested how Bluelock LLC used blogs to get people to trust them and be able to expand their off-page SEO to get more inbound links to their site.
Takeaway – (social media influence on on-site and off-site SEO)
To conclude, on-site and off-site optimisation has to work together for your SEO campaign to be successful for you and your site; without both then you will not be fully optimising your sites potential. In this blog, it will show you how much on-site needs to link effectively to your target words then work on your off-site to get as many inbound links to get your SEO fully optimising your sites potential. To takeaway from this blog, the link between successful SEO and social media is clear to see as in this day and age social media has become a large platform for companies to be able to place themselves effectively on the market. The use of social media is a key tool to use to optimise your SEO – if you have a large following on social media then this allows your on-site SEO to be very easily shareable to the larger community with links back to your site and social media page; also allows your off-page SEO to build a community on social media and increase your inbound links from others blogging and visiting your pages.
References:
- Kloostra, S. (2015) Off-site SEO. In Joomla! 3 SEO and Performance (pp. 117-126). Apress.
- Enge, E., Spencer, S.M., Stricchiola, J., Fishkin, R. & Treseler, M.E. (2012) The art of SEO, Second edn, O’Reilly, Beijing.
- Lieberman, M. (2013) onsite vs. offsite search engine optimization – what’s the right mix?. [online] < https://www.square2marketing.com/blog/bid/145500/onsite-vs-offsite-search-engine-optimization-what-s-the-right-mix > [Accessed 5 April 2017]
- Fishkin, R. (2013) A visual guide to keyword targeting and on-page SEO. [online] < https://moz.com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimization > [Accessed 5 April 2017]
- DeMers, J. (2015) 6 Social media practices that boost SEO. [Online] < https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2015/01/27/6-social-media-practices-that-boost-seo/#6349596d3d17 > [Accessed 5 April 2017]
- Matošević, G. 2015, “Measuring the Utilization of On-Page Search Engine Optimization in Selected Domain”, Journal of Information and Organizational Sciences, vol. 39, no. 2.
- Bannan, K.J. 2009, Blogging tool helps Bluelock improve SEO, Crain Communications, Incorporated, Chicago.
- Matthews, P. 2016, “Social media, community development and social capital”, Community Development Journal, vol. 51, no. 3, pp. 419-435.
