The Keys to On Page SEO and Off Page SEO

What is On and Off Page SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization and using on and off page SEO will help you gain higher ranking in the search engines. When the Google Panda update swept through the online world, about a year ago, it changed the way SEO works for everybody. There are some old strategies you should be aware of before working on the new ones.

With on page SEO, the old strategies had nothing to do with providing good quality content for the reader. They were all about stuffing a keyword phrase into some content a certain number of times to get listed high on the search engine results for that keyword. This leads to many low quality sites being listed very high in the rankings.

With off page SEO, the only thing that mattered was the number of backlinks coming from other sites, blogs, directories, and other web entities. This has changed quite a bit and you can no longer expect to out rank your competition just because you gain more backlinks than they currently have.

Good On and Off Page SEO Today

Good on page SEO consists of high quality content the reader can actually use for what they are after. For example, if you found this post because you searched for SEO, search engine optimization, on page SEO, or off page SEO, then this is considered high quality content for you. There are tips here and knowledge about the subject you were searching for.

If you don’t give your readers what they are after, then they will not stay on the site, and the search engines will not rank you as high as they used to. Now you must provide content that delivers what the reader wants and it is a good rule of thumb, to always post 500 words or more. The best results have been seen with 700 to 1,200 word posts and pages of high quality.

You must also use your keyword phrase properly and not over use it. A density of 1% to 3% is plenty and you want to use it in any heading you have along with the title of the page or post. You also want to use it in the first sentence of the content and last sentence of the content. Bolding it once and putting it in italics, is also recommended.

You can also boost your on page SEO by using an image with an “ALT” tag that is your keyword phrase. Once you have your content properly optimized for the search engines, you can move onto the off page SEO portion of gaining higher ranking in Google, Yahoo, Bing, and the other search engines.

The best ways to achieve good off page SEO is to get backlinks from other blogs and websites, in the same industry, to your website or blog. The higher the page rank or PR of the sites, the better, but this is not the only thing factored in. You want a mixture of very high quality backlinks and lower quality backlinks, so that it looks natural to the search engines.

You can use articles syndication, guest blogging, blog commenting, forum marketing, and link swapping to help you get the high and low quality backlinks you need to your website or blog. Most of these methods can also result in some direct traffic from where your links are and every little bit of traffic helps.

Being Careful with Off Page SEO

There are many services that promise to blast your link out to thousands of sites in a matter of days, but you have to be very careful with off page SEO. These services can be very dangerous because they don’t look all that natural and most of these backlinks will be very low in quality. Make sure your off page SEO efforts happen over a course of time and not all at once.


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