We originally introduced Rich Snippets with two formats: reviews and people. Later in the year we added support for marking up video information which is used to improve Video Search. Today, we’re excited to kick off the new year by adding support for events.

Events markup is based off of the hCalendar microformat. Here’s an example of what the new events Rich Snippets will look like:

Events Rich Snippets : Blog.DirVenue.com

The new format shows links to specific events on the page along with dates and locations. It provides a fast and convenient way for users to determine if a page has events they may be interested in.

If you have event listings on your site, we encourage you to review the events documentation we’ve prepared to help you get started. Please note, however, that marking up your content is not a guarantee that Rich Snippets will show for your site. Just as we did for previous formats, we will take a gradual approach to incorporating the new event snippets to ensure a great user experience along the way.

Stay tuned for more developments in Rich Snippets throughout the year!

The company is growing, so are its products. Recently, it launched a product which would increase the speed of slow loading sites. Its known as Google Site Performance tool which is made available at the Google webmasters tool lab section. Its jam-packed with so many features like website analyses which would get your accurate data on average load time of the site, graphical demonstration of the sites performance before and after the use of the tool and how you could improve it, report generation on specific pages of the site and the tips and suggestions on how you could enhance your browsing experience are some of the coolest feature.

How would Google benefit by doing this? You may want to know. Its simple, when a website loads quickly, it helps in the loading of Google ads which gets them the revenue. Keep in mind, slow loading pages does affect the ads being loaded and minimizes the clicks drastically. Google would develop more tools in a future, one of them being sites ranked according to their speed, we are not sure how webmasters would react to this but we should not forget that from a viewers point it would be of great use.

What are long tail keywords?
Long tail keywords are long and specific keyword phrases that generate little traffic and few conversions each.

Long tail keywords usually consist of several words and they have a low monthly search volume.

Comparison Between Short and Long Tail Keywords

What did the study find out?
Google AdWords advertisers with monthly expenses ranking from $15K to $750K per month were analyzed in the study. All of these advertisers had well managed Google AdWords accounts.

Here are the key findings:

1. The importance of long tail keywords varies. For one company, the long tail keywords generated only 8% of the sales. Another company received 83% of its sales through long tail keywords.
2. It depends on the product. People search differently for different types of products. For one product group people might use more long tail keywords while they use fewer for another product group.
3. The importance of long tail keywords does not depend on the paid search budget.
4. Long tail keywords are most important for SKU-based commodity retailers.
5. For some Google AdWords advertisers, long tail keywords are critically important. One company in the test generated more than 71% of its revenue from long tail keywords.

How to find long tail keywords?
You can use Google Adwords Keyword Tool. It’s free and most probably the best keyword research tool out in the market. Go to Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Select the “Descriptive words or phrases” at left column and type in your Keywords at the right. One keyword/key phrase per line separated by a like break. Make sure to check the box at “Use synonyms” and Click on “Filter My Results”. Here you should un-check both the boxes where it says “Don’t show ideas for new keywords. I only want to see data about the keywords I entered.” and “Include adult content in my keyword results” (You can do it if you are researching on Adult Keywords).

It will return the keywords along with some suggested long tail keywords along with their estimated search volume. You can then check more details on the keywords by changing the “Choose Columns to Display”.

Long tail keywords are important to all AdWords advertisers. Even the company that received only 8% of its sales through the long tail keywords made a significant amount of money with them. Long tail keywords are an important part in any search engine marketing campaign.

(Courtesy:  w7b.org)

Checklist for search engine indexing.

1. Check if your CMS has an opt in option where, it blocks search engines.
Well technically they shouldn’t but some CMS’s like WordPress has a default option which will be checked already where it will block all search engines from crawling the website. This is to make sure that your website is not indexed while you are only setting up the site. But when you forget to uncheck this option, the CMS adds a Nofollow meta tag to the pages whereby search engines will not crawl the site.

2. Check if you have set the correct Robots.txt
Robots.txt files are used to control (not fully though) search engines crawling the website. Make sure you have not blocked bots from crawling parts of your website.

3. Check if your servers are returning OK status

Use tools like header checker tools to ensure that your server is returning a healthy 200 OK status. Anything else should be dealt with immediately.

4. Set up a sitemap
Sitemaps does not guarantee that your site will be up on the SERPs soon, but they are a necessity. They ensure that we have a route map for the bots to follow. So set up a sitemap before even trying to get indexed.

5. If you run plugins check if they are set properly
Setting plugins like SEO plugins are good. But make sure they are set properly. Some plugins have an option to set nofollow meta tags on pages by default to avoid duplicate content issues, if you do not turn this off, it might screw up the indexing process.

I assume that you have done all the basic steps to invite search engines to your site already. Which are as follows -

1 – To submit the website URL to search engine via the submission tool.
2 – If possible, get a relevant contextual link from a good website (which has already been indexed and has good reputation).

Summary
Generally search engine takes its own time to index new websites, and the best way to make sure search engine indexes your site is to get a very relevant text link from a reputed site, but it isn’t easy always. But however, remember to have the basics health check done, so that when the bots are here, you have everything in place.

There is one simple trick which can be said as marketing method or free advertising act. You should publish your link to your website everywhere you can, so that everyone can be redirected to your website. The first act is to contribute yourself to Yahoo answers, and put a link to your website in your name or below your post.

Next, you can join an online forum or discussion, make your own signature and a link which will go to your site, and start participating in the forum. You can also browse to some website or blog which have similar topic with yours. You can also write a comment and leave your back link there, make sure that you are allowed to do so by the owner of the website or blog.

Next, now a days twitter, Facebook, Orkut are very popular social networking websites and its my general observation that if you regularly tweets, scrap etc with your url in tweets and scraps then it will help in boosting your web site rank.

You can also create press release and publish on web site here are some press release examples for you if you are not aware. Press Release are also very powerful tool to drive traffic to your site. PRlog.org, Free-Press-Release.com, WorldPressRelease.org and many more.

You can also submit your web site to directories. If you don’t know from where you can find directory list just check DirectoryCritic.com it provides categorized list of directories accepting web site. Number of back links pointing to your blog or site also plays a vital role in driving traffic to your site or blog.

Problem #1: Non-www and www Versions of Site URLs
If your site has a non-www and www version of all your URLs, you’re going to be splitting link value for the same content between two URLs. Rather than capturing 100% of the link value on the page you want to rank in the search results, you could be doing a 50/50, 60/40, or some other kind of split between the two URLs.

There are a couple of things you need to do to fix this:

1. Decide which URL style you want to use, www or non-www.
2. Set up a 301 redirect so that any links to your non-preferred URL style will go to the right style. This way you don’t waste link value by splitting it between two URLs.
3. Set your preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools so your search result listings are consistent with your style preference.
4. Make sure whenever you build links to your site that you use the preferred URL style.

Problem #2: Duplicate Home Page URLs
This is a close cousin to Problem #1, but is especially bad because it’s your home page. It is possible to have a lot of different URLs that all go to your home page content, especially if you haven’t fixed your www and non-www duplication, which can result in a lot of unnecessary duplication. For example:

* http://www.mysite.com
* http://mysite.com
* http://www.mysite.com/index.html
* http://mysite.com/index.html

These URLs will all lead to the same content. If you have links going to all four of them you will see a four-way split in link value. There are a lot of sites out there that have fixed their non-www and www problems, but I can still find multiple versions of their home page.

I’ve even come across sites with different extensions (.php, .html, .htm, etc.) that bring up the same page as well. This leads to even more duplication and potentially wasted link value.

The fix here is very similar to the first one. Here are a few tips:

1. Set your main home page URL to be http://www.mysite.com. 301 redirect everything else to this URL since it is the most basic (If your preferred URL style is non-www, then do http://mysite.com)
2. If you have to set up different versions for tracking purposes or some other reason, set a canonical tag to show the search engines which version you want showing up in the search results.
3. Make sure when you build links to your home page that you link to the correct version.

Problem #3: Dynamic URLs
This is a fun one that a lot of not-so-SEO-friendly shopping cart programs run into. Once you start including all sorts of variables and parameters in your URLs, the opportunities for duplicate content and wasted link value are endless.

For an example all of the following URLs could lead to the same content:

* http://www.mysite.com/somepage.html?param1=abc
* http://www.mysite.com/somepage.html?param1=abc&dest=goog
* http://www.mysite.com/somepage.html?param1=abc&dest=goog&camp=111
* http://www.mysite.com/somepage.html?param1=abc&dest=goog&camp=111&id=423

Now what if I start rearranging the parameters? Well, they’ll still show the same content. So, as you might imagine, this can create a lot of wasted link value.

There are other causes for the dynamic URL problem. A lot of companies use these parameter-based URLs for statistical purposes. We just want to make sure that you don’t shoot yourself in the foot from an SEO perspective.

This problem also happens with sites that give their affiliates a unique ID to use in their links. You could have 100 affiliates linking to the same page, but all of the URLs will be different because each affiliate has their own unique ID.

The fix here is very simple. Here are a few tips:

1. If possible, make sure that your site is using SEO-friendly base URLs. It’s better to have a base URL that will lead to the content rather than a URL that relies on a parameter. For example: http://www.mysite.com/unique-product.html is much better than http://www.mysite.com/category.php?prod=123 where some generic category page is really the base URL.
2. Set a canonical tag that tells the search engines to use the base version of the URL. That way you can still use parameter URLs like http://www.mysite.com/unique-product.html?param1=123&param2=423 to get your data, but the search engines will consider the basic version as the official one.
3. An even better way to handle this is to capture the data on the server side and then redirect the visitor to the correct URL after you have captured your data. A lot of affiliate networks like ShareASale and CJ do it this way, and you can to. The visit basically goes like this: Visitor clicks on links with parameters -> Visitor goes to site, server records parameter data and 301 redirects them to the right landing page – >Visitor barely notices the switch because it happens fast.This way you can get all the data you need, make sure all of the link value goes to the right page, and your visitor still sees what they were after.

What Problems Does Your Site Have?

URL problems can come in combinations. For example, you could have a non-www and www problem along with dynamic URLs, compounding the problem.

Look over your site and see if you have any of these problems. If you do, decide what fixes you can make. Once you have these structural problems fixed you’ll find that your link building efforts will be much more valuable.

(Courtesy: www.seo.com )

Want incoming links?

Incoming links for a website are the best way to build page rank and get more traffic for a site. While link building is important, it’s more important that it’s done from the word GO, so your hard work gets the credibility it deserves.

Important : To use this guide effectively, don’t try to make all suggestions work for you at the same time. Take a few suggestions and apply them. Once you are comfortable with them, come back and try a few others. Trying a lot of new things at once usually don’t work out well.

Matt Cutts from Google, talks about how building a unique product, offering free services and generating interesting data can usually get you tons of incoming links. But what if your website’s niche is not unique? What if there are a lot of other websites that have more or less the same content as you?

Link baiting is a technique that can get you more links than the competition. Link baiting has been criticized in the past for being a black hat technique and an unethical way of building links. There are ethical ways to link bait as well, and some work very well, but this will be discussed in detail in a future article.

Here are some tips to help you get incoming links for your website :

• Don’t hide the fact that you want incoming links. Most webmasters know about the importance of incoming links and will happily link to you if your content is useful to them. It’s a standard practice on this website to ask people to link to our content, if they like it.

• Make something useful. Find a problem and fix it. People have issues with a lot of stuff : some might want to know how to change a motorcycle’s engine oil and others might be looking for some ‘must have’ kitchen appliances. Yahoo Answers is a great place to start because it let’s you list your site as a reference. You might also do this on other forums, and include links to your site in your signature, but be careful to not increase your post count just to have more back links.

• Allow people to re-use your content. You spent a lot of time and effort in writing about something that people want to read. If someone comes along and asks for permission to copy your content, allow them to do so, with a dofollowed link pointing back to your page. Your article can usually be copied without your permission as well. When someone asks for permission, it gives you a chance to get an incoming link. And don’t worry about duplicate content. Usually, search engines would have crawled your site and found original content on your site before they crawl to copied content. Any duplication can easily be detected. If search engines do not crawl your site fast enough, you might want to impose a time limit (usually 72 hours should be enough) to allow other people to copy your content. When search engines detect a link on the copied content back to your site, they automatically assume your content to be original and you receive credit for creating the article.

• Link out to other websites. The whole purpose of link building is to help websites get connected to each other. So if you wish to get incoming links from other websites, let them see that you are also generous with outgoing links. Make sure the link is dofollowed. If other sites link to you, check if their link has the nofollow attribute. Do not take this to heart though. We’ve all seen posts with almost no original content but with lots of links to great articles. Would you link to such a page?

• Get featured. It takes a lot of effort to get featured on a popular site, but it’s worth the effort.

• Write about something controversial : Controversial articles usually get a lot of attention and can be a great source for incoming links. However, many webmasters consider this to be almost a black hat technique of generating links. Writing about controversial topics all the time also makes people lose interest rather quickly so this is best done in moderation. Be careful, controversies can also backfire on your site and DDOS attacks on controversial websites aren’t unheard of.

• Learn how to write well : Learning how to write great articles will greatly increase your link pulling power. Nobody wants to link to poorly written content. Neither do they want to link to your random musings, unless you are very popular in the first place.

• Socialize : Social networks might eat up a lot of your time, usually because you find so much interesting stuff on them that you want to spend your time there. While this will hamper your productivity in the short run, social networks can be a great way to connect with people who share your interests and to promote your website to them. Interested friends will usually link to your website or promote it further into the network on your behalf. Some social networks also allow you link to be seen directly by search engines, thus creating a free linkback to your site.

• Make socializing easy : Visitors aren’t generally going to take the time to logon to their favorite social network and link back to your article, especially when they are required to describe what they liked about your article. Make use of several “sharing” plugins that make it easy to share your content with a single click.

• Publish breaking news. Fast! : If you publish latest news about your niche on your website, make sure you do it at lightning fast speed and then spread the word. If you do this enough, then you will be known as the source for the latest news updates and a lot of the sites from your niche will link to your content.

• Highlight interesting observations : There is a lot of data out there, generally about everything. Take your time to go through the bundles of data and collate that info ready-to-use information. Precise and usable information generally attracts a lot of links and can become an “authority” document fast.

• Run a contest : If you can afford to spend, then run an easy contest with a big prize. Announce the contest much before it’s closing date and publicize it on social networks. Give bonus points to participants who invite a huge number of other participants. The bigger the prize and easier the contest, the more links you can expect from a wide variety of websites. General discussion forums won’t even object if you start a topic just to discuss this, as it gives members a lot to talk about.

• Get media attention : If you do something unique and creative to get media attention, you’ll usually get incoming links from media websites. These are usually high value links not only in terms of Pagerank, but also to establish your website as a credible resource.

• Giving is receiving : Sponsor a high profile event that will generate a lot of media attention. A small sponsorship will also get a link back from the event’s website and usually also from the media covering the event. Charity donations of a sizable amount are also rewarded with linkbacks.

• Bust a myth : It’s interesting how people usually want to know that they were believing in a myth. If you can surface the truth about any widespread belief, you needn’t worry about page rank for a long time to come.

• Limit your spectrum : Don’t make your website about a lot of topics. Gain trust and authority in one topic before branching out on the next. It will be easier for people to link to your site, “to know all about topic xyz”

(Courtesy: webmasterblog.in)

Do not focus on pagerank alone!

Since Google announced it’s patented ranking system for webpages, Pagerank, there have been a lot of discussions regarding pagerank and how to get more of it for your website. So much so, that webmasters have been completely focusing on this holy grail of web development and placing less important on other factors.

Google has now started telling webmasters that there are a lot of other factors which affect SERP (Search engine results page) placement than pagerank.

Matt Cutts, Google’s voice for search quality, has made consistent efforts to educate webmasters about this for a long time now.

A lot of people write about New York, so if I do a search for [new york] on Google, my best friend’s New York blog probably isn’t going to show up on the first page of my results. Probably what I’ll find are some well-known and official sites. We’ve taken steps to improve the relevance of our search results with personalization, but today’s launch takes that one step further. With

Social Search, Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results. When I do a simple query for [new york], Google Social Search includes my friend’s blog on the results page under the heading “Results from people in your social circle for New York.” I can also filter my results to see only content from my social circle by clicking “Show options” on the results page and clicking “Social.” Check out this video for a demo:

All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is published publicly on the web — you can find it without Social Search if you really want to. What we’ve done is surface that content together in one single place to make your results more relevant. The way we do it is by building a social circle of your friends and contacts using the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you’re following on Twitter or FriendFeed. The results are specific to you, so you need to be signed in to your Google Account to use Social Search. If you use Gmail, we’ll also include your chat buddies and contacts in your friends, family, and coworkers groups. And if you use Google Reader, we’ll include some websites from your subscriptions as part of your social search results.

To learn more about how Social Search works behind the scenes, including the choices and control you have over the content you see and share, read our help center article or watch this video:

This feature is an experiment, but we’ve been using it at Google and the results have been exciting. We’d love to hear your feedback. Oh, and don’t forget to create a public Google profile to expand your social circle and more easily find the information you’re looking for (including that New York blog).

Just watch the USA TODAY’s Jefferson Graham interview with Google engineer Matt Cutts on how to get your site to the top of Google with 5 basic, common sense SEO tips.

This video is courtesy to usatoday.com

Its a video from Matt Cutts (Head of Google’s Web Spam team) explaining how important a webpage’s Title and Snippet is.

He also tells us what’s Google’s view on them and how they are working on it to show most relevant title and snippet for a page which they think isn’t appropriate enough.

So, it’s high time you prepare your pages and optimize them in and out to get the best out of the indexing of your page. Many people won’t like what Matt said here that they will choose a random title and snippet for the pages they they think is not optimized.

Before i start steps for image optimization many people has questions in mind that why image optimization is necessary. Just see below image and your all doubts/confusion will solved.

Image Optimization Tips

The images can be found at the top of the search results and they are linked with web pages. If someone clicks on the image, the person will be taken to the web page that shows the image.

If you have a website about Red Rose, then wouldn’t it be great if an image from your website was listed above the regular results? You’d get many additional website visitors then.

There are several things that you can do to improve the position of your images in Google Image Search:

1. Use a file name that contains the keywords for which you want to be found. In this example, the file name red-rose.jpg would be a good idea. Separate the words with a hyphen.

2. Use a descriptive Image Alt attribute text. It usually makes sense to use the same keywords that have been used for the file name. In this example, the Image Alt Attribute would be “Red Rose”:
<img src=”red-rose.jpg” alt=”Red Rose”>

3. In the same way, you should use the Image Title attribute:
<img src=”red-rose.jpg” alt=”Red Rose” title=”Red Rose”>

4. The textual content on the web page before and after the image also impacts the position of your image in Google’s Image Search. In this example, the text “Red Rose” should appear close to the image.

5. Bigger images seem to get featured more often on Google’s first result page. The bigger your image, the easier it is to get at the top of Google’s regular result page. Include the Width and Height attributes in your image tag to show search engines the size of the image:
<img src=”red-rose.jpg” alt=”Red Rose” title=”Red Rose” width=”800″ height=”600″>

6. Optimize the rest of your web page for the chosen search term. If the complete web page has been optimized for a keyword then it is easier to get good listings for images that are on the page.

Make sure that the image that you optimize for your keyword also looks attractive. If no-one wants to click on the image then it won’t help your website if the image can be found on Google’s first result page.

Check for the Penalization
This is the fist step for deciding a used domain name for your website. As It’s pretty hard to get a domain back in the track after its penalized. The SEO gets to be harder and a lot of time and resources get wasted. If the domain is penalized, it should have no or less indexed pages in the respective search engine. The operator which checks the indexed pages in most of the search engines is “site”. Search for “site:domain” in the search box and see the results. There are also some online tools available like iWebTool, Banned Site Check from SEOHosting.com

Check for the PR
Page rank is a method of google to determine a page’s relevance or importance. Page Rank fraud is becoming a serious problem now a days. If you are buying the domain only for PR, you need to check if the PR is original or fake. I know people who got scammed on buying a domain with fake PR and its very easy to manipulate.

There are many online tools available to check the PR, such as PR Checker. But the easiest and perfect way to check that is Google’s info operator. Search for the “info:domain” command in Google Search Box. If the site info that is returned doesn’t match the site that you searched for, then it’s probably faked. Otherwise, it’s most likely genuine.

Check for Backlinks
You should also check for the indexed backlinks in search engines. The less it is, the higher the chance of being penalized. The operator for Google and Yahoo is “link”, otherwise, its “inlink”. Search for “link:domain” to check for the backlinks indexed. Its my general observation that Yahoo normally shows higher backlinks than Google.

Cache Date
It also help you to check if the domain is banned. the operator for checking this is “cache”. Check if the domain is cached recently, if the cache date is too old, then there is something fishy.

Whois Check
You MUST check it before making any decision. It shows you who is the current owner and registrar of the domain. It also shows you the creation date, registry modification date and the expiry date of the domain. The popular tool is Whois.

You can also check few more things like Alexa Page Rank and Domain History Check.

Courtesy: WebmasterTable.com

Below are nine easy-to-follow tips on how to improve your traffic, not necessarily in order. Its usefulness will still depend on your commitment and dedication.

Be the best
If you have a specific niche then I suggest be an expert on it. Some bloggers look for common interests where they can acquire useful information and tips. You can offer books reviews, do’s and don’ts in blogging, online money making, vacation havens and any other topics you have good experiences and knowledge that you want to share.

Be connected
Include RSS, Bookmark, and tag contents such as Technorati, del.icio.us, Flickr, Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.

Be imaginative
Make the most out of your space by incorporating comments, graphs, polls, meters and other interactive tools. This creates a lively environment and active participation from your members.

Finding this interesting tip and wanna read more???

Be interesting
Do not bore your readers. Be the kind of person that would exude excitement, information, and fun with his personality and posts. Know your visitors and what they enjoy getting to keep them coming back.

Be alert
Proofread, proofread, and proofread. If you can have somebody to do it for you better. A perfect topic can wind up a disaster if simple typo errors and grammars are not checked.

Be generous
It is sometimes appropriate and always fun to give out freebies such as eBooks, software, and other downloadable to your ever loyal readers.

Be active
This is very effective during the early stage of your blog when you don’t have many regular readers yet. The photosphere is a huge network and can serve as a useful avenue to promote you site. Participate in other people’s blogs, forums, and other online networking.

Be smart
Use simple and effective software in monitoring and maintaining your blog. Tools such as Blogger, WordPress.com, TypePad, and LiveJournal can automate some of your chores. It can also provide key indicators and stats on how well your site is doing and what you can do to turn the table.

Be organized
Archive and categorize your posts. Some readers may not exactly remember the title of the article but the month or category type could be easier for them to note.

Product extensions allow images to be shown with your ad. However, unlike Product Listing Ads which are available on a Cost-Per-Action (CPA) basis, product extensions are available on a Cost-Per-Click (CPC) basis. The ads include a plusbox, which expands the ad. Advertisers will not been charged when a user simply clicks the plusbox – it only charge when a user actually clicks through the site.

Additionally, product extensions offer more control than product listing ads. For example, product extensions will only be triggered for ads by keywords set up in your campaign. And you can control which products appear in an ad.

In order to use product extensions, go to your Google Merchant Account and add your AdWords account ID. Then, under the “Campaign Settings” in AdWords, look for “Ad Extensions” and choose “Use product images and information from my Google Merchant Center account.”

Courtesy: SearchEngineWatch.com

At least pretend you’re purpose. It’s important to construct your releases like down-the-middle news stories. Avoid unnecessary adjectives; as most adjectives are unneeded. Don’t let your release to read like an advertisement.

Write in Easy English. Most of releases seen so far are all the time stuffed with industry jargon that most people do not understand. Do not take for granted that what you are writing about is a familiar subject for the people who will read your release. Make it down to easy English.

Send it out manually. As an alternative of just dumping your releases into submission sites and hoping someone important notices, email it yourself to media outlets and bloggers you think might be interested in it.

Don’t beg. Don’t beg for including links. If your link is relevant to the story, the publisher will probably include it.

We are going to talk a trick that can increase your traffic and make your blog in top search listing of search engine’s result. This trick is about using error typing keyword or mistyped keyword.

For example, your content is about ‘black berry mobile’. You will place 5 keywords on the content of your website. Well, there is a trick to get the traffic from people who mistype the keyword. So, from 5 keywords that you want to use, instead of using  ‘black berry mobile’, you can make variation of the mistyping of it such as ‘blck berry mobile’, ‘black bery mobile’, or ‘black berry moible’, so when people mistype it in google search, they will directly go to your site. This kind of error typing usually knows as TYPO!

Onsite SEO – Content Foundation is Key

The old adage that “Content is King” has been used since the inception of Internet Marketing, and this true as off today. The bulk of what’s referred to as Onsite SEO deals with ensuring quality content is infused throughout a website. This content should of course include the keywords that your prospective customers would be using to find your website, but the content should also be original, informative, and should somehow meet the needs of visitors. Onsite content often includes title tags, meta keywords, meta descriptions, outbound and inner page linking, heading tags and of course the most important aspect is content in the form of HTML text. Easily readable by search engines, this content should clearly illustrate what a specific page is all about, engage readers, and have a structure that includes important keywords without keyword stuffing.

Offsite SEO – Reflect Trustworthiness

Naturally, with the focus by SEO consultants and web developers on onsite content, search engines must take into account other factors when ranking a website. This is where offsite SEO comes into play. Unfortunately, this is also where many SEO consultants and web developers tend to throw in the towel. Offsite SEO includes tactics such as link building, social media marketing, press release submission, article marketing, and sometimes reputation management. All of these tactics deal with getting others to discuss your website, and thus offsite SEO builds trust for your website and your brand name.

The Right Balance Outweighs the Hype

The real reason why Offsite SEO is heavily weighted in search engine ranking algorithm is simple – onsite SEO is easy! Quick and simple to create, onsite SEO is all too often stuffed, duplicated, cloaked, and spammed, forcing search engines to trust it less and less. Instead, search engines increasingly wants to see what others think of a website, and to do this Google and many other search engines relies on what’s happening off of your website just as much (if not more) than what’s happening on your website.

Offsite SEO tactics are critical for success because it’s often difficult and time consuming to acquire high-quality inbound links and positive social interactions. Sure there are ways to buy links and manipulate social media websites, but search engin is increasingly seeing past these tactics as true editorial inbound links and real social interactions only come to those websites that can deliver authority and credibility, and that’s what organic rankings are all about. Without offsite SEO, onsite SEO cannot support rankings alone in the face of aggressive competition. If your website company or SEO consultant is unable to address both of these crucial areas simultaneously, your SEO strategy will suffer from a gross imbalance that could give your competition the competitive edge.