Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of helping a website to rank well on the search indices. It is the process of showing the search engines that a website is relevant to those people who may be interested in your products and services. Both onsite and offsite SEO need to be performed on websites to help them to index the sites position in their list, depending on what has been searched for.

The search engines success is dependent upon providing the most relevant content to the person searching; this is why onsite SEO is so important. Onsite SEO is relatively easy to do; it involves ensuring that all aspects of the web page structure are optimised for the information that they are providing, these aspects include page title, description, content and references to images. As the search engines have evolved they have developed very specific requirements as what should and shouldn’t be done on a web page, and over-optimisation (this can include having certain terms repeated too many times, content written un-naturally and hidden content) can cause a websites performance on the search engines to be limited and even penalised. Whether you see the benefit of ranking well on the search engines or not, building websites to be search engine friendly should be done as a matter of course.

Click here to read our earlier blog that considers some of the onsite techniques that should be done to improve your websites chances of success.

Because there are so many websites that offer similar products, services and information, websites that have offsite SEO help the search engines to tell them apart, to rank them within their indexes. Offsite SEO is the equivalent of a vote and as the search engines have become even more intelligent they are able to better determine un-natural offsite SEO (called black hat) it is the job of search engine companies to provide white hat (ethical, natural and long-term) offsite SEO to help websites to perform on the search indexes.

Click here to read our earlier blog that discusses SEO Demystified, the offsite SEO techniques that helps websites to perform at the top of the search engines.

For a website to succeed on the search engines and rank above competitors, both onsite and offsite SEO must be in place. When asked onsite vs. offsite – the answer is both. Offsite SEO will not work if the onsite SEO has major flaws or is non-existent, and will work better if the onsite SEO is logical and natural. Onsite SEO will not work in competitive markets, for competitive terms if there is no offsite SEO – this is because any web page will always be one of many, and it is the offsite SEO that allows the search engines to tell similar pages apart.

Ascensor are an agency providing web design and SEO, Leeds and London.

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