SEO, SEM, web design, coding, iPhone, iPad, Android 

If you are going to increase your rankings on the natural side of the search engines, you will have to get good at SEO (search engine optimization). The thing that most people don’t seem to understand is that there are two main sides to SEO: onsite and offsite. In this post I’d like to give you a summary of the difference between the two so you can learn how to effectively help your rankings.

Onsite SEO

As its name implies, Onsite SEO is doing optimization to your website. In other words, its the little things you do in the creation and maintenance of your site that make it look more appealing to the search engines. Most of this has to do with effective use of keywords.

Search engines are looking to give their users relevant results. So if you are not using your keyword phrases on your website, how can you expect to get a good ranking for those keyword phrases? Here is a small list of some of the things that are involved in Onsite SEO:

• Meta Keywords
• Meta Descriptions
• HTML Title Tag
• Use of Keyword in Alt Tags
• Keyword Density
• etc.

Each of these techniques have their own little strategies that you’ll want to learn, and different things you do are more important that others. From this list above, the most important would be using keywords in your title tag.

In general, Onsite SEO has to do with the actual content of your site. A common phrase to remember is that “content is king.” Having great content that uses your keyword phrases will help you to get a better ranking. But it is just one piece of a bigger puzzle.

Offsite SEO

Again, as the name implies, Offsite SEO is all of the things that you do off of your site or on the rest of the internet as a whole. One of the most common things that we do for Offsite SEO is link building. Link building entails getting a link to your site on someone else’s site.

Here are is a small list of some of the topics associated with Offsite SEO:

• Vary Anchor Text of Links
• Different Types of Links: Reciprocal and One-Way Backlinks
• Linking Strategies: Articles, Blogging, Directories, Etc.
• Social Links: del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, etc.
• etc.

Both Onsite and Offsite are important to your search engine rankings. You will want to take the time to learn how to effectively use both and then continually do it. SEO is an ongoing process and is worth your time to learn!

by Dan Patterson