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On-page SEO + Off-page SEO = Wonder Twins!

August 9, 2011 By korbodo

I’m probably dating myself, but as a kid I remember watching the Super Friends fight crime on TV every Saturday morning. Of the various leotard-clad heroes, the Wonder Twins were among my favorites. With their wonder twin powers activated, one could change into anything water or mineral-based; the other could change into any animal or creature. Working together, they could keep any evil villain at bay.

It’s analogous to on-page and off-page SEO: they’re different, and they’re better together.

For non-branded keywords, particularly nouns, you’ll often see that sites like Wikipedia, IMDB and Amazon do really well. Not only do they have quality content, but lots of people agree and link to them. It’s not too surprising when they rank for searches where the match is a bit of a stretch.

For long-tail keywords, it’s even more critical to balance both on and off-page because the “big guys” aren’t a factor. Tools like PageCritic compare how the top ranked pages use a keyword phrase, often uncovering gaping holes (e.g. not using any part of the keyword phrase in the title) that will get you thinking “how the heck are they ranking?”

That’s where the off-page SEO analysis comes in. Chances are, once you run a report for that site that isn’t using the keyword phrase very well, you’ll uncover a mix of inbound links from relevant & reputable sites to the irrelevant & disreputable. You’ll also want to look at the internal link structure to see what their anchors are.

If the site is for a plumber, finding inbound links from relevant sites about home repair or local directories makes sense, whereas links from a cocktail mixology expert do not. Chances are the poor plumber has no idea those mixology links are there. So, you can do two things: 1) note all the relevant links as ones to go after and 2) if you’re an SEO Agency, use the sources of irrelevant links to find other potential “link building victims” to save! It’ll be your good deed of the day.

Next, look at the internal links for that site – in particular, look at what anchors or links they’re using when they refer to their own content. Those links are another signal to the search engines telling them what the content on the other end of the link is about. They may give you some ideas about what words you should be using on your own site’s links.

Of course I’ve been eating our own dogfood and using WebPosition’s InLinks Beta to do link analysis lately (and loving it!), but the tool is less important than taking the time to understand the competition’s strengths and weaknesses, both on-page and off.

PS, as a childhood Super Friends devotee, can someone please put together a nicely indexed list of all the things the Wonder Twins activated and turned themselves into? Please?