Hi All,

My names Mark, I've been a programmer of some description for a long while (hmmm 1985 I think I started). I don't work in the programming industry any longer but still keep my feet wet selling a couple of products I developed on line. Selling stuff online has meant that I've learned a lot about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I'll use this blog to post short VB6 snippets I've found useful and also some short SEO articles.

I'll kick off today with a discussion on what on-page, and off-page SEO is.

On Page SEO

On page SEO is simply optimizing your HTML code for maximum benefit. This includes the text visible to users, and the code visible only to crawlers (such as meta tags, title tags and so on). Actually optimizing onpage content is a huge topic which I won't go into too much depth. But things to keep in mind are optimizing a page for 3 or less keywords, having an optimized <title>, making sensible use of the <h1> and <h2> tags, and achieving decent keyword density. On page SEO also includes your site structure and how you structure your site links. Try taking a look at http://www.seo-guy.com/seo-tutorial/visible-text.html for a more detailed discussion of on-page SEO.

Off Page SEO
Off page SEO is almost entirely how other sites link to your site. There are three aspects of how they link, the URL they link to, the anchor text they link with, and the whether the link is spiderable or not. The most important factor is the anchor text. So if you are selling blue widgets then the best anchor text you could have in a link to your page is 'blue widgets'. If you are optimizing your homepage to sell blue widgets then the link URL should be http://www.blue-widgets.com/ and the anchor text 'blue widgets'. The final factor is whether a link is spiderable. If a link to your site is not spiderable, or is on a page that is not crawled by a search engine 'bot then it is useless to you. I'll do a post sometime on determining whether a link is spiderable.