If you have been promoting your site for long you may have heard the terms “On page” and “Off page” optimization more than once. Both of these terms describe integral pieces of the SEO puzzle. Techniques for these two terms are crucial to building traffic to your site.  There are differences between the two. You still need to understand what both of these terms entail and how they can benefit you. Leveraging the techniques of these two terms will help you drive more traffic to your site and ultimately generate more sales. 

On page optimization is the beginning of the SEO process. You make changes to your site that is needed to qualify for higher search engine rankings for certain key word phrases. These activities are performed to increase page rank and thus increase search engine visibility.  Both on page and off page optimization are required to achieve desired results. Neither of these concepts are able to stand alone. 

When you are utilizing on page optimization you deal with issues such as good quality content, Meta tags, internal linking and some web site coding. This also involves the use of key word phrases that match your site’s content and audience.  The keywords must be included in page titles, text on the page, headlines, sub-headlines, image file names and possibly domains that you want to be found with. Internal linking refers to the manner in which you link all of your site’s pages to each other. The important pages in your site should link to the main page. A sitemap is needed to ensure that each of your sites pages is found by search engine spiders. Above and beyond all of this your site must also have good quality content that entertains and educates your readers. All of these elements will make your site more appealing to both search engines and your visitors.

When you are dealing with off page optimization to improve your search engine rankings you will deal with techniques such as: directory submission, article submission, blog commenting, forum posting, social profiles and social bookmarking. All of these techniques can help you build a strong, sound linking profile for your site.

The easiest way to explain on page and off page optimization is to say that the activities that take place on your site are known as off page and those that are performed off your site are considered off page. If you wish to create an effective SEO campaign both of these optimization concepts are needed to drive traffic to your site and ultimately achieve online success.