Search Engine Optimization Means Both On-page SEO and Off-page SEO

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization is the design or adherence of a website to some guidelines that help it easily categorized by the search engines so the search time for the relevant keywords is reduced on the part of search engines. The more focused topics a web page has the easier it is to categorize for the SEs that they improve their ranking in their search results for those web pages. This is where the focused topic is brought by the optimal usage of “keywords”.

There is no right or wrong in SEO (Search Engine “Optimization”). Only whether it is done optimum or not. There are two aspects of SEO for a website or web page. They are called on-Page SEO and off-Page SEO. For long time I had doubts on how to optimize these two and used to think off-page SEO is more important. But many online writers, including Triond writers, are digging goldmines in world wide web doing both.

What is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO refers to all the optimizations done within the page. This is where the basic search engine optimization started. These include keywords, meta tags, titles, tags, body, footnotes, comments (all kinds of text with different weightages for each) etc.

As it is on the page SEO, it is easy for any webmaster to master these skills and do optimally to make the search engines follow them. This resulted in black hat SEO where this is done optimally yet created a dominance of the same sites for unrelated searches. Innovating search engines like Google have come up with a new technique to combat this known as Off-Page SEO.

What is Off-Page SEO?

Off-page SEO is simply SEO of a web page external to the page. That is nothing is done to the page itself that one can see directly. For ex, other sites linking to a web page help off-page SEO, when done optimally (related websites linking together or within them). Here again there is no right or wrong linking as many would say. It is only optimization. You may overdo it (get too many links from irrelevant sites) or under-do it (don’t get any links at all, sit there and hope to get visitors J). It doesn’t matter. You are doing optimally or not.

Google invented (also patented) their page ranking algorithm that beats the black hat SEO performers. After this black hat experts mastered to play games here too by grouping webmasters and linking their sites. But page rank got innovated enough to add weight to the incoming or outgoing links based where they are located in the page, how they are linked (anchor text), which page in a website they come from, and what is their own page rank and so on.

As this is again optimization one should not think things will get worse if Google innovates something else. Google may find something new (for example Google Images search) but once a technology reaches optimal point it stays there. That is why don’t try overdoing any aspect of SEO, just do it optimum.

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