Of all the challenges that webmasters face, SEO is one of the most daunting. For the lay-men, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, meaning how you as a webmaster can get Google, Yahoo, and MSN among others to rank your website in the top search results for the keywords you are targeting. When I personally approach SEO, I do not look at it as just a single task at hand. Instead, I break it down, into the 2 important categories that I can focus on.

In its simplest form, I like to divide SEO down into 2 more manageable areas. The first area that I break it into is On-site Optimization, and the second area, predictably is Off-site Optimization. Both are important, this is one thing many webmasters do not understand. Some of them preach that on-site optimization is truly the only important form of SEO, while others will tell you that off-site optimization is what will get you top rankings in the search engines. But the real deal is that they are both important, and you should not ignore either of them. So what is the difference between the two.

In a nutshell, On-site optimization is the editing and coding of your actual website to increase optimization. Off-site optimization is the Link Popularity, Link Relevance, and anything else that is not a direct manipulation of your own webpage. For a good example of just how powerful Off-site optimization is, Google the word failure. It is pretty safe to say that George Bush is not optimizing for that term anywhere on the Whitehouse webpage. In my opinion, the key factors of SEO, in no particular order are:

1) Link Popularity and Link Relevance (Off-site) 2) Internal Linking Structure (On-site) 3) Content Relevance (On-site) 4) Crawl-ability / Code Optimization (On-site)

This may seem like I a dumbing down of the art of SEO, which in some regards it is. However, the key factors that I just mentioned above are the basis and are easily broken down into much finer detail, such as the kind that you may find in an in-depth book or report. An important thing to keep in mind in 2007 is that getting high rankings on the Search Engines is not going to happen overnight, or sometimes even at all, just because you have optimized your webpage. If this were 7 or 8 years ago, then keyword stuffing and meta-tags would work just fine. But that form of optimization will just not cut it in todays competitive search engine market. Do not let this dissuade you though. Just make sure that you utilize a balanced attack of on-site and off-site optimization, through utilization of social-networking sites, link partnering, quality content, text link campaigns and more.