To really improve your search engine ranking, you’ll need to incorporate both on-page and off-page SEO strategies. But what does this mean? Here’s an overview.

What is On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO is the way you write content and code on your page.

On-page SEO all starts with the content. Without relevant content that captures your readers’ attention and keeps them on your website, no amount of keyword-seeding or meta-tagging will help. Once you have a solid content offering, make sure it contains lots of helpful links to related material, and use headlines, subheads, and even images to “tell” the search engine there’s some good stuff here – stuff that deserves to be indexed.

In addition to the visible content on the page, coded meta-data, like title tags, page description tags, and image alt-tags are also important tools in on-page SEO. Your keywords should be embedded in every element of your website. Website architecture is also an important element of on-page SEO; a well-structured site helps search engines find everything on your site and index your content.

What is Off-Page SEO?
Off-page SEO is about building links that point to your site.

Some good tactics for getting links to your site include guest blogging on related sites; cross-linking with related sites; posting your content on external sites like YouTube, SlideShare and Flikr; and establishing a social network presence. These tactics are largely under your control.

Putting it All Together
First, and foremost, write interesting, relevant content targeted to the audience you’re trying to reach. Great content will be found by others and if it’s really good they will start linking to it naturally. Make sure your site/blog includes your keywords in the body of the content, titles, hyperlinks, and meta tags so search engines can find you. Build inbound links to your site by guest blogging, participating in social networks and by posting content on major third party sites.

People are looking for great content. Develop great content and help people find it and you will have both on-page and off-page SEO covered.