Search engine optimization (SEO) techniques can be classified into two broad categories and these are onsite SEO and offsite SEO methods. Both are essential to accomplishing your purpose of enhancing the rank of your website in the results pages of search engines. However, it may also be helpful to differentiate them and know when to focus more on one factor than the other to achieve the best results.
In onsite SEO, you are working with elements that are available in your site, such as the loading time, keywords, articles, layout and theme, and meta tags. The meta tags are important because the search engines look at them to determine the topic of your site to index it properly. Thus, it is important to choose the appropriate title tags, the title of the page, and the description meta tags carefully to make sure that the search engine spiders will index the website using your targeted 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, make sure that you do not focus only keyword density because your resulting articles will be of low quality. 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. The browser may also time out and simply refuse to show the contents of your website. Also connected to this are the background, graphics, images, and color on the web page. 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.
On the other hand, the offsite SEO technique usually has to do with the building of back links and this could be achieved through article submission to the various directories, article marketing, and being involved in blogs, bookmarking sites, and social networking sites. One should focus on getting back links from sites with high rankings in the results pages of search engines and those websites focusing on topics related to your site. 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.






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