There is a lot of information about seo that can be found online but not everything that people tell you is true. There are even some people who try to mislead you and feed you with useless or even wrong information. This article should give you an overview of about on-page and off-page search engine optimization.

The facts:

It is not very hard to find out what search engines want for on-page optimization. Simply go to google and perform a search for your desired keyword. When you have a look at the top 10 results you will see that these websites have some things in common. Most of them will have the keyword in the title tag and in their meta-description. Also the keyword can be found in the URL most the times.

If you have some time, you can analyse the top 10 results in order to find out what they have in common. Have a look at the keyword density, where the keywords are positioned and what other related terms they use. When you do on-page optimization, make sure that your website has a different title than the top 10 results. That's to avoid dublicate content. Also your body text shouldn't be similar to the top 10 results, have something unique.

Off-page optimization is much harder to do and pretty complicated to understand for beginners. Basically off-page optimization means that you make your website popular by getting links to your website. These links should be one-way links, that means that you don't link back to the websites that have placed a link to your site. Not only the quantity of links counts but also the quality of the links. The quality of links is a huge topic and can not be explained completely in one article. There are many factors that make a link a quality link. For example the google pagerank of the website that places a link to your website is one important factor. That means a link from a pr 6 website boost your search engine position more than 500 pr 1 links.

There are some websites that are regarded as industry leaders. These websites have a high pr and are well respected by the major search engines. If you can manage to get one of these websites to link to your website, then your search engine position will climb to the top. Of course it is not easy to get one-way links to your website but there are some methods that every webmaster can use:

- Submit your website to the major web-directories to get one-way links.

- Submit your own articles including a link to your website to various article-directories.

- Create a Squidoo lense with links to your website.

- Create unique quality content for your website, this will make people link to you automatically.

As you can see, search engine optimization is a huge topic and can not be learned in a couple of days. Another fact is that seo need time and patience. If you have a very new URL beware that it might take a couple of months to get to the top 10, search engines do not trust very new domains.