SEO – otherwise known as Search Engine Marketing is the practice of improving a websites ranking through natural or organic search results on sites such as Google, Yahoo or MSN.

With increased demand of PPC keywords and increasing costs, a greater emphasis is now being placed on the natural ranking of a website. So much so, that SEO has evolved in to two fields;  On-Page  Optimisation and Off-Page Optimisation.

As a result, I thought this would be a good opportunity to distinguish between the two and provide a quick reference guide to the type of activities which fall in to each category.

On-Page Optimisation

As it says on the tin, on-page optimisation primarily involves editing the content and HTML coding of a websites pages to increase relevance of specific keywords (the stronger the match to the content, the better!) and removing potential barriers to indexing for search engine robots or spiders.

This can include, but isn’t limited to;

Title Tags
Meta Tags
Alt Tags
H1 Tags
URL Structure
Meta Data
Image Names
How the site is built (E.g. CSS not tables)
Formatting of content
Usability (Remember, a viewer should be no more than 3-4 clicks away from what they want!)
Internal linking
No duplication of content
Site maps
Site architecture

Off-Page Optimisation

Off-page optimisation primarily concerns strategies that are done off the pages of a website in order to maximise the performance in search engines for specific keywords relevent to the page content.

Once again, these can include but are not limited to:

Press releases
Article distribution
Local marketing
Social networking/bookmarking (E.g. Twitter / Digg)
Promotions (Competitions/Freebies)
Keyword research & analysis
Duplication checks
Website analytics
Link campaigns
Directory listings
Link exchanges
Blogging
Anchor text