When talking about SEO, there are many ways you can break it down into categories. This vs. that. Good vs. bad. Black hat/white hat. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
But really, all SEO boils down to two things - the content on your website and everything else.
On-Page SEO
Let’s talk a minute about the content on your website. First, search engines don’t index websites. They index web pages. That’s an important distinction because you must view each web page as a separate entity with the search engines. The elements of your on-page SEO include:
- Text content
- Photos and images
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Headlines and subheadlines
- Meta tags
- Other tags
- Code to content ratio
- Design, navigation, and infrastructure issues
The primary thing to consider with your on-page content elements is that they all need to work together. Not necessarily for SEO purposes, but for design purposes as well. You really need to think about how you want your web pages to look (will you use a template, design every page with a unique look, etc.) and how you want the pages to connect as well. You have to make navigation through your site easy for your visitors so that they can find what they are looking for when they get to your website. You can do that and keep you on-page website elements SEOd for maximum benefit.
On-page SEO, especially when it relates to your content, is about two things (keywords and linnks). How you manage these two elements means a lot. But these are not by any means your only considerations. It is important to also make your on-page SEO elements work with your off-page SEO elements.
Off-Page SEO
While on-page SEO is about links and keywords, with some design and navigation considerations as well, off-page SEO is a little simpler. You really want to focus on links. Keywords are important only to the degree that they are used to link back to your website. In a word, inbound links is the name of the game.
When building links, there are various strategies and they all have their place. I highly recommend making a list of important keywords. To start, pick 10 of your most valuable keywords or keyword phrases (don’t pick the same ones or ones that are too related) and make them your anchor text phrases. Anchor text is simply the name for keyword text links.
Let’s say you are a basket weaver. You don’t want all of your anchor text links to have the word basket in them. Come up with some useful synonyms. Start with 10. You can expand your list later. But think up 10 keyword phrases that are different and unique enough that they would appeal to different segments of your target market, but that are related to your topic enough that they will prove to be of value. Next, start your link building campaign, which should consist of the following strategies:
- Article marketing
- Offsite business blog
- Forum posting
- Directory submissions
- Website memberships
- Blog commenting
- Social networking
You don’t want all of your anchor text to use the same phrases. That’s why you come up with 10 keyword phrases that you’ll use in all of your online activities. Whenever you post in a forum or make a comment on a blog, for instance, you’ll use your anchor text. In all of your membership profiles at social networking sites, directories, etc. you’ll use your anchor text. After you’ve built a sufficient number of anchor text links this way then you can add more phrases to your list.
Ongoing Changes To SEO
Always stay on top of the changes being made at the search engines because SEO is not an exact science. The guidelines frequently change and one strategy that works well today may not work so well tomorrow. Of course, no matter how much the strategies change, SEO will always be primarily about keywords and links. How you manage these two aspects of on-page and off-page SEO determines a lot in how successful you are in the long run.
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