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Onpage vs Offpage SEO

Onpage SEO are factors that an webmaster can control like the content, the navigational structure, the HTML tags employed.  Offpage SEO are factors that are in many cases outside of your conrol like incoming links, reviews, blog reviews, and how your website compares to other sites in your industry.

Onpage SEO factors

HTML Basics: Using the right tags

The most powerful SEO tags are required for use on most pages.   They help to define to Google, Yahoo, and MSN what your webpages are about and how to rank those pages within the search index. 

  • Heading Tags <H1>, <H2>, <H3>
  • Strong Font Tags <Strong>
  • Hyperlinks <A href=>
  • Alt tags <img src=image.jpg Alt='An image about SEO' >
  • Underline & Italic <u> & <i> (not as important)

These tags will be the base for building your website and help you to start putting together a site that can get noticed.  You will see that there are just a few of them, and they are all you will need to emphasize the important parts of your webpage.

Step Two: Meta Tags

The meta tags are the most important part of onpage SEO.  They are the primary way that you tell the search engines about your webpage topic.

  • Title Tag - The title tag is in the <head> section of the webpage and it must be unique.  If you have two pages with the same title tag, a search engine will typically choose 1 of the pages to index.  The other page may also appear in the index but is typcially not ranked well in the index.
  • Meta Description - The meta description should be written sentences and it should be no more than 25-30 words.  So it is relatively short and it doesn't say everything on the page.  But it should be a base of information and summarize what the page is about.  This is very important and most of your important words should appear in the title, the description, the keywords tag and also in the webpage content.  Most search engines will not show you in the rankings unless the words that you are listed for are readable on your webpage.
  • Meta Keywords - It is commonly thought that Google does not rely on keywords to rank your pages.  But as of this writing both MSN and Yahoo do take keywords into account.  With Google it will not hurt you to have your keywords listed.  Good ideas for keywords are to make sure that your keywords are also written on your webpage, there are fewer than 20 words, and that you don't keyword stuff.

    This means that you should not list the same keyword or phrase more than one time.  And that you don't use the same word more than a couple of times.  You may find this challenging at some times.  Just follow these simple guidelines and you'll do just fine.

Step Three: Valuable Content

To have valuable content means that it is worthy of reading and that a web visitor will actually take the time to read what has been written. Not all websites have the same purpose, but most website want to get a customer to act.  This can be prospered by have inspiring text that leads a customer to act or react to what they are reading.  What we typically see is that when a webmaster over does his SEO the content can become very difficult to read because the main concern is the ranking and not the visitor.

So, don't fall into that trap.  Make sure that your content is easily readable and valuable to your customers. 


Offpage SEO Factors

Offpage SEO refers to those factors that affect your SEO that are not located physically on your website.  These factors, while outside of your control are in many cases more important than they actually content or design of your website.  This is especially true with Google who has been know to rank webpages very high just for Offpage factors like incoming links and incoming link text.

The following are Offpage factors:

Step 1: Incoming Links

Links have been commonly thought to be the most important aspect of SEO.  This has never been more true than with the Google index.  Incoming links provide a "honest vote" for your website and what it is about.  Google uses these honest votes to rank websites for phrases and keywords.  

Getting sites to link to you is just as important as content.  Many webmaster spend a great deal of time formulating plans to obtain incoming links to your webiste.  Over the history of the modern internet, there are many examples of linking schemes that have become popular and then quickly fade to the wayside.  One reason that links are so valuable and good ones are hard ot come by are that search engines are constantly trying to figure out what are honest votes and what are arranged links. 

  • Develop ideas to generate incoming links to your website.
  • Exchange reciprocal links to your website.
  • Exchange non-monetary value for incoming links. 

Step 2: Becoming an Authority

While this is difficult to do, it is important to work towards defining your website as an authority.  It is where the search engines will know exactly what your website is about and the industry that you belong within.  You probably know about the authority sites in your industry.  These are the largest sites, and those sites that are typically found within all of the search results.  These sites are like, Blue Nile for the jewelry industry, BestBuy for electronics, Radio Shack for parts, Toyota for cars.  We all know what these websites are about, they are authorities.

  • Get as many relevant sites to link to you as possible.
  • Link out to sites that an authority would be expected to link to.

Step 3: Your Neighborhood

To help the engines rank websites, the engines will use their links to categorize websites into neighborhoods.  This concept may be difficult to understand, but it is really simple.  If you sell toys and have a link fom Toys-R-Us this link will help to define your website as a site about toys.  But if instead your website has a link from Toys-R-Us and your website is about it is less valuable for SEO purposes.  The reason for this is that it doesn't help to define your website.  Know take the same example and assume that instead of 1 link, you had 100 incoming links from websites about toys.  This would lend even more credibility to your website and begin to define you as an authority about toys.

  • Link to your competitors.
  • Get your competitors to link to you.
  • Get listed in relevant websites.
  • Joing directories and get listed in relevant categories.

Step 4: Directory Listings

Can be very valuable at getting the engines to know what your website is about.  The reason for this is that you will be displayed within a selected category amongst all of your competitors.  With this listing the search engines can quickly tell what your website is about by these links.

Some popular directories are:

These are just a few of the important directories that you will want to get listed within.
 
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