Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website on organic search engine result pages (SERPs), by incorporating search engine friendly elements into a website. A successful search engine optimization campaign will have, as part of the improvements, carefully select, relevant, keywords which the on-page optimization will be designed to make prominent for search engine algorithms. Search engine optimization is broken down into two basic areas: on-page, and off-page optimization. On-page optimization refers to website elements which comprise a web page, such as HTML code, textual content, and images. Off-page optimization refers, predominantly, to back links (links pointing to the site which is being optimized, from other relevant websites).
There is more to on-page SEO but let’s move on to off-page SEO.
Off-page SEO or Search Engine Optimization, is everything that happens off of the website. Off-page SEO can include things like backlinks, social signals and mentions.
We will focus on backlinks because this is the one some dealers have heard of. A backlink is a link from another website to your website. Explained a different way, when another website has a live link on their website, that when clicked on, it takes the visitor to your website. Google looks views backlinks as if they were a vote for your website.
Not all backlinks are created equal. For example, if you had a website that was about civil rights and you had backlinks from 20 individual blogs pointing web visitors to your website, that could be important to your search engine ranking. However, if you had 1 backlink from Martin Luther King Jr’s website, that would be truly powerful. In addition to having credibility with the visitor that came from MLK’s website, Google would smile upon your website also. This “vote” could count for more than 20 links from random blogs.
There are a variety of ways to build backlinks to your website but the best backlink is “earned.” Offer great content on your website, build relationships, offer a variety of content on your website, and “earn” backlinks from reliable, credible, websites.
There are hundreds of ways for you to improve your on-page and off-page optimization but the two important points to remember are:
- There is a difference between on-page and off-page optimization. Not including content creation, off-page optimization requires much more work and an ongoing commitment.
- The best optimization happens somewhat naturally and that is because you have great, relevant, and timely content that viewers want to read, comment on, and link to.
