Basically, on-page SEO is about creating a website that attracts users and, therefore, search engines, while off-page SEO is about getting exposure for a website and, at the same time, building trust and authority. On-page SEO is about optimizing the web pages of your website. In on-page SEO, your strategy is very much under your control. Off-page SEO, on the other hand, is about improving your SEO through other means, such as creating content and getting backlinks from other websites.
These tactics give credibility to your website. If you want to use the best SEO practices, on-page and off-page SEO are great starting points. Off-page SEO refers to all SEO tactics that don't involve updating or publishing content on your website. By focusing first on the page, you can improve your visibility and the quality of your site, and also boost all future SEO and digital marketing efforts in the future.
Off-page SEO can't be ignored today, but it's essential to recognize that it's about much more than link building. That said, both in-page SEO and off-page SEO are vitally important to your SEO strategy and you must invest in both so that your site gets the best results with your investment. However, as a general rule, it's best to work on page SEO before going into off-page SEO. If you want to make sure you get the most out of your on-page and off-page SEO efforts, check out my list of the best books to learn how to optimize search engines.
On-page SEO involves several techniques that help improve the user experience of your website, make it easier for search engine robots to find your content, and ultimately increase your chances of ranking higher in SERPs. That's the basic idea behind on-page and off-page SEO for website optimization, but the full comparison goes much deeper. Having search engines crawl and index your website is what makes it possible for search engines to rank your site first, and therefore, without these improvements, any other SEO investment will show no results. And if there are any acronyms or abbreviations below that you're not clear about, check out my SEO acronyms page for a quick definition.
Off-page SEO refers to the components of search engine optimization (SEO) that occur “outside or outside of a website”. Not only will this off-page SEO strategy give your site new backlinks, but these mentions can also generate referral traffic. There are a lot of different features that you focus on and are improved upon with your on-page SEO strategy. As you'll discover in the next section, the main difference between on-page and off-page SEO when it comes to links is that you can control the links that appear on your site.
And when you're done reading, be sure to check out my other posts on why your business needs SEO and why SEO is important to your online success for additional information on this topic.