Affiliate Marketing Journal

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.

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 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 key onsite SEO factor is the keyword density, which is the percentage of the recurrence of certain words or combinations of words 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.  The browser may also time out and simply refuse to show the contents of your website.  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.

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.