On Page Vs. Off Page SEO: Which Is More Important?
There are SEOs today, and some of them are quite well known, who teach that link building is the most important aspect of SEO. But is it? Well, just try building links to a blank page and see what happens. I’m betting not much.
On the other hand, I’ve seen web pages rise to the No. 1 position for their targeted keywords just for their on page factors alone.
A few years ago Google fixed a problem called Google Bombing that caused certain pages to rank No. 1 on the basis of thousands of inbound links using the same anchor text. The thing was, the anchor text was seldom relevant to the page in question. We can chalk that one up to the value of link building.
Of course, it goes without saying that both on page and off page SEO are important. But, what if you had to do without one or the other? Which would you choose? You’d better say off page SEO because even if you could rank a page on the basis of inbound link anchor text alone, what value would that be for a page with no content?
There’s more to SEO than being No. 1 in the SERPs. You’ve also got to convert traffic and you can’t do that without on page content.
Two Branches Of SEO
There are two branches of SEO that every website owner should be familiar with. There’s on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
Your on-page SEO consists of keyword management, meta tags, alt tags, navigation, and other elements that exist on your page to help you produce effective SEO for your website. Off-page SEO consists of anything you do off of your website, such as building links, that produces SEO benefits.
One of the best things you can do off page is to list your website in directories. Many webmasters don’t know it, but you can submit your internal web pages to deep link directories and build links to those internal pages.
Neither on-page SEO or off-page SEO is more important. On-page SEO, of course, must come first. And it should really be your focus in the early days of website development. But after your website is built you’ll need to focus on link building and off-page SEO.