The two main categories for search engine optimization (SEO) techniques are offsite SEO and onsite SEO tactics. Both are important to achieving your goal of having a better rank for your site in the search engine results pages. 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 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. 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, 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.
The page theme, layout and loading time are also important factors in onsite SEO. 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.
Meanwhile, the offsite SEO strategy is mainly involved with back link building, which is often accomplished through article marketing, article submission and posting comments on bookmarking sites, social networking sites, and blogs. It should be mentioned that back links from websites with similar content and those that have high rankings in the search engine results pages are those that matter. 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.