What are onsite and offsite search engine optimization?

This article today is to provide you some SEO Help on understanding the difference between two types of optimization for the search engines:

• Onsite SEO.

• Offsite SEO.

Onsite Search Engine Optimization:

Onsite SEO or on-page SEO encompass all the techniques used within your website design and content itself, such as the layout, the keywords, the quality of your content, the size and description of your pictures, the navigation structure of your site, etc.

Providing some on-page SEO help is not too complicated as the designer has (in theory at least) full control over his web design. This type of optimization is crucial for a proper indexing in the search engines as the crawlers will analyze all the information found of your site to identify its nature.

Clearly, it would take far too much time to details all the techniques of onsite SEO just in this post itself, nonetheless, I think it is important to highlight some major techniques that would dramatically affect your on page optimization compare to those who don't apply them:

• Page Title. Nowadays, maybe the most important on-page SEO technique is to have your keyword in your page title. Search Engines give a lot of weight to the page title, so forget useless titles such as "welcome to my website".

• Meta Tags. Although those have lost a lot of value lately, it's still a good practice to include your Meta tags. One note of caution though, is to prevent keyword spamming.

• Meta Description. Don't forget to add a meta description in your site, more often than not, this is the text that will be use by the search engines to describe your website, so make it powerful and compelling.

• Keyword. Having your main keyword in a heading tag, and also spread reasonably throughout your post and at the end of your page will add value and weight to it. Again, be careful of keyword spamming.

• Images descriptions. All your pictures should have a description tag associated, yet again, beware of keyword spamming.

• Onsite linking. Make sure that the navigation of your website is smooth and well structured. No page should be further than 2 clicks away. Typically, your Level 1 page should link to your Level 2 pages, which should in turn link to your Level 3 content pages.

Just by doing those few SEO help techniques, you will place yourself ahead of at least 90% of your competition.

Next, I want to talk about Offsite SEO.

Offsite Search Engine Optimization:

Also known as off-page SEO, these techniques if I may call them so, are ways to affect the ranking of your site by external intervention.

Where you have almost full control in on-page SEO, you do have much less say in off-page SEO.

"While on-page SEO will get you indexed in the search engine, it is off-page SEO that will give you a good ranking. With on-page SEO techniques, you work on the quality of your website, with off-page SEO, you work with its popularity."

Popularity on internet is defined by your number of inbound links. The more links are targeted towards your website, the more valuable search engines consider it, and therefore the better your ranking will be.

Below are a summary of the most popular off-page SEO practices to increase you number of links:

• Link Exchange. By way of mutual agreement with other webmasters, you agree to trade links with one another benefiting both from this. It is one of the easiest and most practiced SEO methods.

• Press Release. Another great way to acquire inbound links is to write press release, though I personally prefer Article writing.

• Article Writing. By writing and sharing powerful quality articles over the internet, it is one of the most powerful techniques to acquire tons of inbound links, as well as increase your reader audience.

• Forums. Participating actively in forums related to your niche will benefit you greatly. When I say participate actively, I mean it, not just put some stupid comment to get some links to your website. Doing so will sure get you banned and blacklisted from the forum.

If you are serious about promoting your website, all the SEO help practices I gave you today will help you do so. Like the yin and yang, you need both on-site SEO and off-site SEO to promote your website efficiently.

To Your Success!