Two Sides of the SEO Coin

I've had a lot of conversations about search engine optimization recently. Opportunities abound for businesses, bloggers, e-commerce vendors, website owners among others to take advantage of a few basics when it comes to SEO. You have to start somewhere and in my experience there are basics that a lot of people miss that, when adhered to, can do a lot to help.

For those, like me, who take a keen interest in such things there's no shortage of information, best practices, and methods to learn about, know about and to try. However, for a lot of people that are in business on the web - bloggers, brick and mortars, etc. - it's hard to know where to start, what you need to know and even how much you can affect your search engine rankings.

This post isn't going to be about PPC, adwords or anything like that. It's about the two sides to the SEO coin - on-page optimization, and off-page optimization. Get these concepts down and maximize your efforts there and you will see a definite increase in the quality of your traffic.

On-Page SEO

This is really where it all begins and this starts with good keyword research. The tool that I use is called Market Samurai and it's absolutely amazing - but more on that in another post.You need to do some reserach for your website/company and determine how you can compete in the search engines for the keywords you're looking at. Once you've got a good target you need to work on optimizing your pages, posts, images, etc. for your keyword terms. This means that you're using your keywords in your anchor text and in your heading tags. Each page on your website should have an appropriately named title that contains your keywords. Each image should be named with your keywords on the associate page as well, and if for no other reason than practicing good usability principles, each "alt" tag and needs to be named correctly as well.

Off-Page SEO

This has become probably the most important piece of search engine optimization. You simply can't underestimate the power of quality backlinks to your website. Off-page SEO takes in to account others who are linking to your website, and the relative authority of their website. If you're a product vendor then getting listed on your manufacturer's website would be a great place to start. For bloggers, you need to have other sites linking back to your posts. Guest posting is one way to do this, article syndication is another. Do well with off-page SEO and you will see noticeable impact on your search engine rankings.

Hopefully if you're new to the concept of search engine optimization this will take some of the mystery out. It really boils down to creating compelling content, using a few best-practice principles and then getting your content in front of the right audience. In reality there is much more to SEO than what's discussed here and the competition is fierce. But, like I said above, you have to start somewhere and getting a good grasp of these concepts will help you on your way.