search engine optimization (SEO) techniques can be classified into two broad categories and these are onsite SEO and offsite seo methods.  Both are essential to accomplishing your purpose of enhancing the rank of your website in the results pages of search engines.  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, make sure that you do not focus only keyword density because your resulting articles will be of low quality.  Also, search engine algorithms have been provided with a way to counteract the technique of overstuffing an article with keywords and phrases and that is to impose a maximum permissible keyword density.

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.  Also connected to this are the background, graphics, images, and color on the web page.  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.  One should focus on getting back links from sites with high rankings in the results pages of search engines and those websites focusing on topics related to your site.  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.

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