Many businesses with an online presence now understand the need for implementing an SEO strategy. But search engine optimisation is a broad area of activity, and many specialist tactics and strategies are used by SEO companies.
It can be confusing or difficult to manage SEO campaigns without breaking things down into logical categories. Generally speaking, SEO activity can be broken down into two broad categories: on-site SEO and off-site SEO.
What is On-Site SEO?
On-site SEO refers to everything you can do on your website to improve its SEO and therefore, its Google ranking.
In order for a website or web page to be considered deserving of a higher search engine ranking, it has to tick a number of boxes, some of which are quite complicated for the inexperienced (not in the least because Google changes its algorithms regularity).
On-site SEO practices include unique quality content, Google friendly code and layouts, meta-descriptions, title tags, SEF (Search Engine Friendly) URLs and so on.
So What is Off-Site SEO?
Everything that happens on the Internet away from your business website that links back to your website affects off-site SEO. This includes such things as a social media strategy, blogging strategy, external article posting, paid online advertising (with Adwords or business directories like the Yellow Pages, Yelp etc.) and creating effective and quality back-links from other websites and blogs. Each link from an external website to your site passes an amount of “link juice” acting like a vote for your website authority.
As the amount of external references to your business website grows, more and more “link juice” is passed to your website, and in turn, you achieve increased prominence in search engine results.
It is important to keep in mind that all back links are not valued in the same way. In order for your off-site SEO to be successful, your SEO strategy need to follow certain rules to ensure back links are from quality websites, relevant to your keywords and theme. If you expect your SEO to be boosted by posting an article to hundreds of directories, you might not see any results. In fact, you could damage your rankings or even attract a Google penalty.
Getting Help With Search Engine Optimisation
It is a great idea to engage in some DIY SEO practices, but only by hiring professionals who know the ever-changing world of SEO inside out will you be able to really optimise your organic traffic and know you are making effective use of your time.
At We Are Web Design, we have the tools, experience, and knowledge base that can help you to get your SEO on track and give you an important competitive advantage. An advantage of our SEO packages is the support for DIY SEO. We love to educate and assist clients with their own SEO efforts, after all working closely together means even better results.
