What is SEO (Off Page & On Page)

Whenever you enter a query in a search engine and hit 'enter' you get a list of web results that contain that query term. Users normally tend to visit websites that are at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the query. If you have ever wondered why some of these websites rank better than the others then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” listings on search engines. All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have such results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. Payment isn’t involved, as it is with paid search ads.

Off Page SEO

Off page SEO or search engine optimisation is doing things off site to improve your sites search engine rankings. The only thing you can do off site to incraese your rankings is build up more links. More links will generally lead to better Google PageRank and better search engine rankings.

When you are trying to get more links you need to think about quality, not all links are created equal and links from low quality sites will have little or no impact on your rankings. The best types of links that you can get are from trusted sources such as universities, newspapers and even some of the top notch directories such as dmoz and Yahoo.

It is sometimes difficult to spot the good links; here are a few questions you should ask yourself when you are looking at sites or pages to get links from:

• Is this site or page relevant to what I do?


• Is this site linking out to any low quality off topic sites?


• Is this site or page going to send the right sort of traffic?


• Is this site or page ranking well in the search engines?


• Does this site have a lot of links from other websites?

Another important factor is the way that the sites link to you, sites that use the rel=nofollow tag to link to you or sites that use a redirect to link to you will not help you, also the search engines look at the text that links to you, if you are trying to rank for the phrase blue widgets and you can get a site to link to you including that phrase in the text or alt tag of the link then that is going to help you to rank higher for that particular phrase.

On Page SEO

On page SEO is the process of optimizing the content of your website. This includes the text, images and links on your website. Anything uploaded to your site's domain is considered on page.

Components of On Page SEO

There are several key factors of on page SEO. One of the most discussed factors is keyword density. Keyword density is given as a percentage. The percent value represents the number of times a keyword or phrase appears compared to the total number of words on a page. Other on page factors include the total amount of indexable text a page has as well as the usage of bold text and headings.

On Page SEO & Meta Tags

To properly optimize a page it is necessary to add the proper tags to the page. This includes adding ALT tags to images. ALT tags are short and description and will show up when a user mouses over the image. Other tags include meta tags like keywords and descriptions both used by spiders to return relevant search results.

On Page SEO & Titles

One of the most heavily weighted tags in regards to on page optimization is the title tag. The title tag is also the link that a user sees and clicks on when they run a search. Title tags should contain relevant keywords used to describe that the page is about.