The two main categories for search engine optimization (SEO) techniques are offsite SEO and onsite SEO tactics. Both are essential to accomplishing your purpose of enhancing the rank of your website in the results pages of search engines. However, it may help to know what distinguishes these two categories so that you may know where to concentrate your efforts at certain times to get the best results.
Onsite SEO is involved with those elements found in your website, such as content, loading time, keywords, the layout and theme, and the meta tags. The meta tags are one of the ways by which the search engines are able to discern the topic of your website and how they will index your site. Therefore, it is advisable to select the proper page title, description meta tags, and title tags carefully to ensure that the spiders of the search engines will classify your site under your chosen keywords and phrases.
Another vital onsite SEO item is the keyword density or the percentage of the recurrence of your targeted keywords and phrases on a web page when compared to the total number of words. However, it is not advisable to have articles on your site that are based only on keyword density because this is likely to result into low quality content. Moreover, search engines have algorithms that detect the practice of overloading an article with keywords and they now penalize a website that surpasses the maximum keyword density that they allow.
Other important onsite SEO factors are the loading time and the page layout and theme. One should be careful with loading time because a visitor may become impatient and click on the return button if it takes too long for the page to load. There is also the possibility that the browser will stop loading the page if it is taking too long to load. Related to this are the graphics, background, color and images on the website. The technique is to find out the preferences of the people who are likely to buy your products or services when deciding on these factors.
Meanwhile, the offsite SEO strategy is mainly involved with back link building, which is often accomplished through article marketing, article submission and posting comments on bookmarking sites, social networking sites, and blogs. It should be mentioned that back links from websites with similar content and those that have high rankings in the search engine results pages are those that matter. Back links from sites that are not in any way related to your website may not improve your site’s rank and may even degrade it.