The Big Picture of SEO Techniques - Search Engines - SE Optimization

There is a lot of buzz about search engine optimization (SEO) and there is a good reason for that: the key to earning money on the Internet is traffic and SEO is a great way to get traffic. While Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign may give you traffic much sooner than SEO, it's expensive and the cost is too high for many people. So SEO is the good and affordable option.

When we look at the big picture, there are two categories of SEO techniques: on-page and off-page optimization. Any SEO techniques you encounter can be classified into these two categories.

The first category is on-page optimization. As its name implies, on-page optimization is done on the pages of your site. It is done by arranging your pages in such a way so that they become search-engine friendly. Since here you are dealing with your own site, it's safe to say that it's relatively easy to do. All the factors involved are under your control.

There are several things you can for on-page optimization. One of them is using good titles for your pages. Good titles are those that contain your target keywords. Next, you need to put your keywords inside H1 tags. Text within H1 tags are considered to be more important by the search engines and consequently whatever you put there has significant impact. Another thing you should not miss is the internal linking of your site. You should interlink relevant pages in your site since it makes your site more friendly to the search engines.

The second category is off-page optimization. As its name implies, this category deals with techniques that are applied to things outside of your own site. Consequently, you have less control here and it's more difficult to apply than on-page optimization.

But the difficulty makes off-page optimization important. In many cases, off-page optimization determines whether or not you succeed in SEO. Since many people can do on-page optimization, it is your knowledge of off-page optimization that makes the difference. The more you know about off-page optimization, the better your opportunity to defeat your competitors.

So what should we do in off-page optimization? Essentially it boils down to just one thing: link building. The more relevant links you can get, the better your page will rank. What you need to do is learning how to obtain as many good links as possible. While there are many ways to do this, two popular ways are directory submissions and link exchanges.