SEO blog

On Page vs Off Page Optimization: Who Wins?

I’ve been around the seo block a few times in my now 5 years of dealing with website development and optimization; though I am only really catching on to how successful SEO works in the recent past.

As an ignorant webmaster - I was always religious about proper on page optimization techniques: Proper title, meta content, headings, keyword density, emphasized keywords with bold and italics, etc.  I’m by no means discounting the importance of these things. . . as then can, in some cases, play an important role in your search engine positioning.

However, once again I am reminded of the importance of incoming links, the anchor text used and other important factors related to off page optimization.  As pointed out in this post titled pagerank wins  - if on page factors determined website rankings: we’d have SERPS filled with “keyword spamming trash” as the author rightfully put it.  Here’s a little blurb from the page that I feel covers my point adequately:

SEO copywriters, for obviously self serving reasons, would prefer that Google place more weight on on-page elements. They would prefer that anchor text be discounted. They would prefer it if PageRank didn’t play such a large role in determining search engine ranking.

The argument goes likes this:

If my page contains the search terms in the page titles, in the H1 tags, and bolded and italicized in the body copy - then it is obviously more relevant than a page which doesn’t contain the search term in the page titles, H1 tags and body copy.

This idea makes sense until you realize the implications.

Google’s home page only mentions the word Google once in the page title, and once on the page. So if the SEO copywriters got their way, a search for Google would be dominated by any hack who loaded their page with obnoxious repetitions of the word Google.

If Google implemented an SEO copywriter’s algorithm, Google wouldn’t even be included in the search results for “search engine”.

If Google implemented such an algorithm, the search results for Computers would not include www.apple.com, www.dell.com, www.compaq.com or IBM’s home page.

If Google implemented such an algorithm, the SERPs would be dominated by keyword spamming trash.

In the end?  Good positioning in search engines is determined by your off page optimization efforts.

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17.Feb.07 Off Page SEO, On Page SEO Comments (0)

Where are your meta tags?!

For all the stringent, on page seo hardliners our there that believe on page optimization is the absolute key to success for a website regarding search engine rankings - I have a couple of things to share:

The #1 result in Google for “webhosting” (39 million+ results)  has no meta tags in place. (www.webhosting.com)

The #5 result in Google for “dog training” (13 million+ results) has no meta tags in place.
(www.bestfriendspetcare.com/srv_caninec.cfm)

The #3 result in Yahoo for “affiliate program” (112 million+ results) has no meta tags in place.
(www.mytemplatestorage.com)

The #2 result in Yahoo for “car insurance” (152 million+ results) has no meta tags in place.
(www.statefarm.com)

These are just a few examples.  This post is really intended to benefit the unfortunate people who are brainwashed and spoon fed the fallacy that on page optimization alone will get you top search engine rankings for highly competitive keywords.

Of course I personally belive that on page seo methods are important, and I employ a great number of them myself on various websites of mine.  I just don’t think it’s fair to the uninformed (those that pay for seo services) that they are fed the lies that on page optimization is the absolute key.

What’s your take on this?

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13.Jan.07 On Page SEO Comments (0)