If you’ve been in the market for search engine optimisation services you’ve likely read at least a little about offsite SEO and onsite SEO. Put simply onsite SEO is any optimisation work done directly to your site. This can include: ensuring keywords are located in the title and meta tags, maintaining a consistent keyword density in the content that you write, providing an XML sitemap, etc.
In contrast, offsite SEO is just as the name implies – any optimisation techniques utilising properties that are not located on your website. Now that you have a basic understanding of the fundamental difference between offsite and onsite SEO, we’ll look a little closer at the factors involved with each.
3 Important Offsite SEO Factors
While the below is not an all-inclusive list of offsite SEO factors, it will provide you with a starting point of things to incorporate into planning your SEO strategy.
- Backlinks: When someone links to your site from their site, this is called a backlink. Backlinks vary in quality and recently Google has introduced a number of penalties for building poor quality backlinks. To avoid a penalty:
- Never purchase backlinks.
- Never spam your website using programs like XRumer.
Don’t build backlinks on poor quality open directories.
- Web 2.0: Recently, Google has been placing more weight on social media factors such as number of likes on Facebook, number of tweets, and number of Google +1’s. By writing good quality content, you can ensure your website will be shared amongst social media users.
- Guest Posting: a popular way to gain backlinks is through guest posting whereby you provide content to another site in exchange for a link back to your site. This can be a great way to gain some extra link juice and some extra traffic.
3 Important Onsite SEO Factors
- Keyword Density: keyword density refers to the number of times your keyword appears in the content on your site. With the introduction of Google’s over optimisation penalty is best not to overstuff keywords into your content. For optimal results, try to maintain a keyword density of 1 to 3%.
- Keyword in Title Tag: Having your keyword in the Title Tag has become a popular practice by those seeking to reach the top of the SERPs.
- Fresh Content: recently Google has been placing a high priority on content creation and seems to rank fresh content better than older and potentially expired content. To stay ahead of the game ensure that you are consistently publishing fresh content for your readers.
Conclusion
Although this is a very brief introduction to the important factors involving onsite and offsite SEO, it should nevertheless provide you with a starting point for ensuring your site are optimised. In addition to the six factors listed above, there are numerous others – many of which hold just as much weight. Check out some of our other articles to see how you can use these factors to your advantage.
About the Author:
This article was written by Joel Mayer for Australian Web Marketers.
