Anyone trying to understand the world of SEO – or Site Engine Optimisation to give it its proper title – needs to know that the discipline is usually separated into two main areas.
And these two main areas of SEO are: onsite and offsite.
The terms are self explanatory, but they can easily confuse people.
Onsite SEO is basically all that can be done on an individual website to make it fully optimised for the search engines. Offsite SEO is all the tactics that can be employed on other websites to make the main website ideally optimised for the search engines.
Onsite SEO can include many things, but boils down to site structure and navigation, content and metadata. In more detail, this means how the site has been built and how easy it is for users, and indeed, search engine bots, to respectively operate and crawl the site. Content is judged by its quality and relevance to the user, and, metadata is how the site is described to the search engines via certain key indicators (or tabs).
Offsite PR is ensuring the main website is properly connected within the wider web and comes down to how many other websites know of its existence. To expand this a little further, it means how many other websites know of its existence and then provide a link back from their pages, to the main website. Much of this comes down to making sure that the main website is not a lone voice, crying out for friends in the vain hope of attracting attention.
Both onsite and offsite SEO have their roles to play within digital marketing and both are worthy of a lot of attention.