SEO AKA Search Engine Optimization is a set of tricks and tools to enhance a website’s visibility to search engines and elevating position on result pages. These strategies and techniques tries to get your site appear first on any search engine. We have included this topic into the list of 10 Ways to Increase Website Traffic.

There are two main types of SEO improvements.

1. Onsite

Onsite SEO means the tricks and tweaks applied on a website. Onsite SEO includes modifications in,

• Links
• Keywords
• Meta Data
• Images
• URLs
• Site Map
• Website Structure
• Technology
• Website Content
• CMS, Etc.

All these listed elements are internal parts of a website. Onsite SEO optimizes these elements for improved search engine visibility.

2. Offsite

Offsite SEO tricks the element outside the website which affects the website’s ranking in the search results. Those elements are,

• Back Links Generation
• Press Releases
• Various Blogging Techniques
• Web Directories
• Reciprocal Links
• Bookmarks
• Social Media Etc.

These are the elements or places which you can leverage upon to enhance your site’s search engine visibility outside of your site.

In the essence, onsite SEO is building a qualitative personality of your website in the eyes of search engines while offsite SEO is reputation creation based on that website personality.

Onsite or Offsite or Both?

Now, you understand both ways. But should you use any one of them or both for your website? Let’s see.

Onsite optimization makes your website internally compatible with the search engines. This is vital for the search engines to understand the quality of your website and your trend to stay updated with technologies, parameters and provide fresh, original content. The robots and crawling measures of search engines understands that your website provides good, authentic material. Now, the search engines, apart from the popularity of a page or website, recommends those pages/websites first which it thinks has genuine content, up-to-the-mark website built quality and real value to offer.

On the other hand, Search Engines considers the off-site SEO elements to measure the website’s ‘reputation’ among other websites. It’s more like an assessment of what other websites thinks of the website’s offering. For example, the search engines tracks the outbound links coming to the site and sees how many clicks it makes and also how many of those outbound links comes from a site which is ranked as ‘reputable website’ in search engine index i.e. Time Magazine referring to your blog.

A website with fewer backlinks yet from reputable website could get top place than a website with many backlinks yet coming from sites of lesser importance.

Most of the offsite SEO strategies circle around generating backlinks for your website. It could be from a PR, guest blogging, web directories, social media or any other source. And Search Engines also takes offsite elements into the overall consideration to understand the popularity of the site or the page. So, you can’t negate that option too.

We recommend to use the right mixture of both options. The mixture could be thorough with use of every option available in both strategies or could be lightweight including options which are the most prominent influencers on search engines. Consult our professionals for free to understand which SEO technique would be perfect for your website and your budget.

Pitfalls to Beware of

For your website, according to the need, you can chose any of the options or go on both ways, for best results. Thing to remember here is that any type of Search Engine Optimization is a big task to handle and if done by inexperienced hands, could result in total opposite results i.e. search engines lowering the rank of the website. Reason is, there are so many things to take into consideration and create a seamless projection for the search engines. It requires technical knowledge and considerable experience to do it and that’s why there are special SEO employees working in companies.

It is totally possible to happen and happens every day, if the site uses duplicate content, outdated technologies and parameters or tries to gain search engine visibility through illegitimate procedures. In long term, such tricks for instant SEO benefits always ends up with site getting thrown at the bottom and tagged as fraudulent among search engines.

Cheap and inexperienced SEO service providers could turn this nightmare a reality for you. Instead, go for service providers with thorough professional skills and understanding of the service and related technologies which can guarantee you about the positive long term outcomes. Like us.

That is all you should know about SEO.