On page vs Off page vs Technical SEO: Priority, easy to handle, easy to measure.
-
Hi community,
I am just trying to figure out which can be priority in on page, off page and technical SEO. Which one you prefer to go first? Which one is easy to handle? Which one is easy to measure? Your opinions and suggestions please. Expecting more realistic answers rather than usual check list.
Thanks
-
Page, off-page, and technical SEO are three essential components of search engine optimization (SEO), each with its own set of priorities, ease of handling, and methods of measurement. Let's break down each of these aspects:
PMP Exam Prep
Priority:On-Page SEO: This should be a top priority. On-page SEO involves optimizing individual web pages for search engines. This includes optimizing content, meta tags, headings, and ensuring a user-friendly experience. It's important because it directly affects the quality and relevance of your content to users and search engines.
Off-Page SEO: This comes next in priority. Off-page SEO focuses on building the authority and reputation of your website through link building, social signals, and online mentions. While it's crucial, it often depends on having solid on-page SEO first.
Technical SEO: This should also be a high priority. Technical SEO deals with the technical aspects of your website, such as site speed, mobile-friendliness, and crawlability. If your website isn't technically sound, it can hinder both on-page and off-page SEO efforts.
Ease of Handling:
project manager jobs
On-Page SEO: This is relatively easier to handle because it's within your control. You can update content, meta tags, and make your website user-friendly with manageable effort.
Off-Page SEO: It can be more challenging because it often involves building relationships and earning backlinks from authoritative sources, which can take time and effort.
Technical SEO: This can be complex and might require technical expertise. Handling technical issues like site speed optimization and ensuring proper indexing can be challenging, but it's crucial for overall SEO success.
Ease of Measurement:On-Page SEO: It's relatively easy to measure the impact of on-page SEO. You can track keyword rankings, organic traffic, and user engagement metrics (e.g., bounce rate, time on site) to gauge its effectiveness.
Off-Page SEO: Measuring off-page SEO can be a bit more indirect. You can monitor backlink growth, referral traffic, and online mentions to assess its impact on your website's authority and visibility.
Technical SEO: Measuring technical SEO requires tools like Google Search Console and website auditing tools. You can track metrics like crawl errors, site speed, and mobile-friendliness to evaluate its effectiveness.
In summary, the priority of SEO components should start with on-page SEO, followed by technical SEO, and then off-page SEO. On-page SEO is the easiest to handle and measure, while technical SEO can be more complex but is essential for the overall health of your website. Off-page SEO is crucial for building authority but can be more challenging to manage and measure due to its indirect nature. To have a successful SEO strategy, it's important to strike a balance and address all three components effectively. study abroad -
The order of priority between on-page, off-page, and technical SEO can depend on the current state of your website. However, it's commonly recommended to start with technical SEO before focusing on on-page and off-page SEO.
Technical SEO: This refers to the process of optimizing your website for the crawling and indexing phase and involves aspects that improve your site's readability and understanding by search engines. It includes measures like ensuring your website has an SSL certificate for security, improving site loading speed, creating a sitemap, and making your website mobile-friendly. Without proper technical SEO, search engines may have difficulty accessing, crawling, and indexing your site's content, which could make all other SEO efforts less effective.
On-Page SEO: Once technical SEO issues are addressed, you can focus on on-page SEO, which refers to content and HTML source code optimizations. It includes aspects like keyword optimization, meta descriptions, header tags, image alt text, and URL structure. On-page SEO is all about providing high-quality content and optimizing that content around specific keywords. It's crucial for ensuring that search engines understand your content and can therefore rank it appropriately.
Off-Page SEO: After your site is technically sound and your content is optimized, off-page SEO helps improve your site's reputation and authority. Off-page SEO includes actions taken outside of your own website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs). The most commonly known off-page SEO tactic is backlink building, but it also includes techniques like social media marketing, guest blogging, and brand mentions.
In terms of ease of handling and measurement:
Technical SEO, while it can be complex depending on the issues, is relatively straightforward to measure because you're dealing with concrete factors such as site speed, mobile-friendliness, etc. Tools like Google's PageSpeed Insights, Mobile-Friendly Test, or a full-fledged site crawl can give you clear indications of what's working and what's not.
On-Page SEO is also fairly easy to manage and measure. You have direct control over your content, and you can use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to see how your content performs in terms of traffic, click-through rate, impressions, and rankings.
Off-Page SEO can be the most challenging to handle and measure because it often involves factors beyond your direct control, such as gaining backlinks from other websites. However, tools like Moz's Link Explorer, SEMRush, or Ahrefs can help you track your backlink profile and overall domain authority.
-
@Lynn12 Hi,
What points should we cover in On page and technical SEO? -
A- On page optimization- It includes optimizing different segments of a website. This directly affects the search engine rankings. Hence, it is also known as on-site SEO. It has to maintain the relevancy of websites to improve its ranking. They include keyword optimization, title tag optimization, meta tag, internal link optimization, image optimization, etc.
Off page optimization- Off page SEO depends on another pages to increase your site’s ranking. It involves third party help to increase online visibility. It helps in obtaining fresh links. Link building increases the traffic to your website and help in ranking high. The process includes social bookmarking, social media marketing, link-building, etc. -
on-page,
technical,
off-page
On-page is basics and should be done first. You can see its effect just in a few months or weeks sometimes. When it is done properly, websites start ranking (of course with low competition keywords, but still it is the you're doing it right).
What is great here is that you can improve on-page SEO occasionally and detect what brings the best ranking results.
Technical issues are important too as indexing, mobile friendliness affect SERP in a positive way and actually they are important ranking factors.
Off page SEO is being discussed much though backlinks still work. There are good services for backlinks purchase just choose the best one matching your needs.
Hope that helped a bit. Good luck!
-
On-site is priority number 1. Before you can conduct any off-site, you need to have a solidly built website to direct them to, or they'll simply bounce.
There are niche affiliate marketers such as Income School that rely solely upon on-site SEO for the success of their businesses. While I disagree with their theory of not conducting off-site strategies as a part of my link building efforts, I like the fact they solidify the necessity to focus on your website.
I'm not sure what you mean as far as Technical SEO, I think there are quite a few advanced aspects to both on-site, and off-site SEO, but I haven't seen it categorized separately from the two by itself quite yet, not saying some experts don't, just new outlook to it as of this moment.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Anyone suspect that a site's total page count affects SEO?
I've been trying to find out the underlying reason why so many websites are ranked higher than mine despite seemingly having far worse links. I've spent a lot of time researching and have read through all the general advice about what could possibly be hurting my site's SEO, from page speed to h1 tags to broken links, and all the various on-page SEO optimization stuff....so the issue here isn't very obvious. From viewing all of my competitors, they seem to have a much higher number of web pages on their sites than mine does. My site currently has 20 pages or so and most of my competitors are well in the hundreds, so I'm wondering if this could potentially be part of the issue here. I know Google has never officially said that page number matters, but does anyone suspect that perhaps page count matters towards SEO and that competing sites with more total pages than you might have an advantage SEOwise?
Algorithm Updates | | ButtaC1 -
Can we ignore "broken links" without redirecting to "new pages"?
Let's say we have reaplced www.website.com/page1 with www.website.com/page2. Do we need to redirect page1 to page2 even page1 doesn't have any back-links? If it's not a replacement, can we ignore a "lost page"? Many websites loose hundreds of pages periodically. What's Google's stand on this. If a website has replaced or lost hundreds of links without reclaiming old links by redirection, will that hurts?
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Is it bad from an SEO perspective that cached AMP pages are hosted on domains other than the original publisher's?
Hello Moz, I am thinking about starting to utilize AMP for some of my website. I've been researching this AMP situation for the better part of a year and I am still unclear on a few things. What I am primarily concerned with in terms of AMP and SEO is whether or not the original publisher gets credit for the traffic to a cached AMP page that is hosted elsewhere. I can see the possible issues with this from an SEO perspective and I am pretty sure I have read about how SEOs are unhappy about this particular aspect of AMP in other places. On the AMP project FAQ page you can find this, but there is very little explanation: "Do publishers receive credit for the traffic from a measurement perspective?
Algorithm Updates | | Brian_Dowd
Yes, an AMP file is the same as the rest of your site – this space is the publisher’s canvas." So, let's say you have an AMP page on your website example.com:
example.com/amp_document.html And a cached copy is served with a URL format similar to this: https://google.com/amp/example.com/amp_document.html Then how does the original publisher get the credit for the traffic? Is it because there is a canonical tag from the AMP version to the original HTML version? Also, while I am at it, how does an AMP page actually get into Google's AMP Cache (or any other cache)? Does Google crawl the original HTML page, find the AMP version and then just decide to cache it from there? Are there any other issues with this that I should be aware of? Thanks0 -
Latest Best Practices for Single Page Applications
What are the latest best practices for SPA (single page application) experiences? Google is obviously crawling Javascript now, but is there any data to support that they crawl it as effectively as they do static content? Considering Bing (and Yahoo) as well as social (FB, Pinterest, etc) - what is the best practice that will cater to the lowest-common denominator bots and work across the board? Is a prerender solution still the advised route? Escaped fragments with snapshots at the expanded URLs, with SEO-friendly URL rewrites?
Algorithm Updates | | edmundsseo2 -
What's the correct format when you Disavow a single page? with or without www.?
Hi Y'all. Can't seem to find an article on disavowing a single page. Do i use A, B, or submit both A and B? Example: A. http://disavowexample.com B. http://www.disavowexample.com Which one does Google prefer? I know for some I just find the canonical url of the page (which show www,) but wanted your expert advice! Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | Shawn1240 -
Page details in Google Search
I noticed this morning a drop in the SERPs for a couple of my main keywords. And even though this is a little annoying the more pressing matter is that Google is not displaying the meta title I have specified for the majority of my sites pages, despite one being specified and knowing my site has them in place. Could this sudden change to not using my specified title be the cause of the drop, and why would they be being displayed by Google in the first place, when they are there to be used. The title currently being displayed inthe SERPs is not anything that has been specified in the past or from the previous latest crawl etc. Any insight would be appreciated. Tim
Algorithm Updates | | TimHolmes0 -
SEO for FMCG
Hi folks I'm basically hoping for some tips for great resources specifically focusing on SEO tactics for global FMCG ... Obviously I'm doing my own research but would love help from the community if possible with; 1- material on general SEO 2- Material on local SEO 3- Material on Image SEO 3- material on Video SEO any help would be greatly appreciated
Algorithm Updates | | Intrested0 -
Google Dropped 3,000+ Pages due to 301 Moved !! Freaking Out !!
We may be the only people stupid enough to accidentally prevent the google bot from indexing our site. In our htaccess file someone recently wrote the following statement RewriteEngine On
Algorithm Updates | | David_C
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301] Its almost funny because it was a rewrite that rewrites back to itself... We found in webmaster tools that the site was not able to be indexed by the google bot due to not detecting the robots.txt file. We didn't have one before as we didn't really have much that needed to be excluded. However we have added one now for kicks really. The robots.txt file though was never the problem with regard to the bot accessing the site. Rather it was the rewrite statement above that was blocking it. We tested the site not knowing what the deal was so we went under webmaster tools then health and then selected "Fetch as Google" to have the website. This was our way of manually requesting the site be re-indexed so we could see what was happening. After doing so we clicked on status and it provided the following: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Content-Length: 250
Content-Type: text/html
Location: http://www.mystie.com/
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
MicrosoftOfficeWebServer: 5.0_Pub
MS-Author-Via: MS-FP/4.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2012 02:27:49 GMT
Connection: close <title>301 Moved Permanently</title> Moved Permanently The document has moved here. We changed the screwed up rewrite mistake in the htaccess file that found its way in there but now our issue is that all of our pages have been severely penalized with regard to where they are now ranking compared to just before the indecent. We are essentially freaking out because we don't know the real time consequences of this and if or how long it will take for the certain pages to regain their prior ranks. Typical pages when down anywhere between 9-40 positions on high volume search terms. So to say the least our company is already discussing the possibilities of fairly large layoffs based on what we anticipate with regard to the drop in traffic. This sucks because this is peoples lives but then again a business must make money and if you sell less you have to cut the overhead and the easiest one is payroll. I'm on a team with three other people that I work with to keep the SEO side up to snuff as much as we can and we sell high ticket items so the potential effects if Google doesn't restore matters could be significant. My question is what would you guys do? Is there any way we can contact Google about such a matter? If you can I've never seen such a thing. I'm sure the pages that are missing from the index now might make their way back in but what will there rank look like next time and with that type of rewrite has it permanently effected every page site wide, including those that are still in the index but severely effected by the index. Would love to see things bounce back quick but I don't know what to expect and neither do my counterparts. Thanks for any speculation, suggestions or insights of any kind!!!0