On-Page and Off-Page SEO Strategies by Bill Hartzer
Wondering if your SEO strategies are working? What about the new strategies everyone is talking about? Should you implement all of them?
On-Page and Off-Page SEO Explained
In this presentation at the 2017 Rocks Digital Marketing Conference, Bill Hartzer, Senior SEO Consultant at BillHartzer.com, shares “Everything You Must Know About On-Page and Off-Page SEO”! Bill is the founder of DFWSEM Association (2004) and a US Brand Ambassador for Majestic.com and OnCrawl.com. He has been practicing Organic / Natural SEO since 1996.
Presentation Overview
- Off-Site SEO Linking Basics
- Using Majestic for Link Analysis
- Analyzing and Fixing Your Links
- Using OnCrawl for SEO Analysis
Google has run experiments that excluded links as a factor; Google doesn’t have a way to exclude links yet.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is the underlying text of what people will click on. The way Google used this for ranking a website was very different several years ago. For example, let’s imagine there is a text about “red cars” and your page is linked to it. Even if your page is about blue cars, if people were linking to your page using the words “red cars” then you ranked high in Google. This went on for about 10 years, but now things have changed quite a bit. An on-page text is just as important as the off-page text for SEO.
It’s not just the link, but the link placement. Where the link appears on the page has value. The least valuable place to have a link on a page is in the footer. The higher up on a page a link is, the more likely people are going to see your link and click on it.
Paid vs Natural Links
The actual placement on the page is important. But in the last 10 years, Google has had the technology to understand the difference between a paid link and a natural link – which makes SEO much more difficult. For example, a paid link in the middle of a web page can be made to look like it is part of the content, but Google knows it is actually a paid link, so they don’t pass “link juice” to that link.
You can have your rank drop due to buying links. Also, the US Federal Trade Commission said that somewhere on your site, sponsored links and ads need to indicate that they are sponsored.
When sites have gotten bad rankings due to links, people have had to comb through the site and examine their links.
Link Schemes Are Bad
Excessive Link Trading – sites where you trade links.
Example: if you have 100 links, but the majority are from trading links, then that’s where you are going to get into some issues. But trading links is not always a bad thing. For instance, a homebuilder website might link to an air conditioning site. If the two sites trade links that could be beneficial. Guest posting can be OK for a few guest posts, but when you get a certain number, then it could become an issue.
