Why Both Onsite and Offsite SEO Methods Are Necessary
February 26, 2010 by admin
Filed under Search Engine Optimization
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.
Why SEO Requires You to Make Use of Back Links
February 22, 2010 by admin
Filed under Search Engine Optimization
Back links are vital to your SEO activities because search engines generally regard them as indicators of the popularity of your website. This is understandable because other webmasters may not want to have links guiding their visitors to your website if they do not consider the information on your site to be helpful. Thus, the more back links your website has, the better would be the rank of your site in the search engine results pages.
Back links have become important factors to take into account in the SEO procedure because they increase the possibility that your website will be indexed much quicker by the search engines. Back links are also helpful in increasing the number of quality site visitors for the long term.
However, remember that it is the quality back links that are counted by the search engines and not just any link. Search engine algorithms now have provisions that reject black hat SEO practices such as the use of link farms in which a web page contains nothing but links. Thus, a search engine like Google, may only consider a particular back link as a vote for your site if it comes from another site that has the same topic as your website. Thus, a back link that comes from a website that focuses on a theme that is not relevant to your topic will not be counted when the search engine computes your site’s rank in the results pages.
It is also important to remember when using back links that their quantity should only be allowed to increase slowly over time. If the quantity of back links grows too rapidly, the search engine may find this to be suspicious and penalize your site instead. More and more search engines are considering back links to be important because it would be more difficult for site owners to manipulate them than links that already exist on their sites. Search engines have also become stricter in their methods of evaluating the quality of back links because of the unethical practices of some webmasters in the past.
A strategy that is usually utilized for building back links is to contact other webmasters and offer to provide them with a back link if they also create a back link for you as well as utilizing article submission services. However, it is important to make sure that you are dealing only with those websites that have similar content as yours or they would have little effect on your SEO efforts. A better method, although it would require more time, is to make sure that you are posting quality content on your site and to submit your articles to the various directories with tools such as Article Submit Auto.