Over
past couple of months it has been quite noticeable that
amount of time and effort that is going into website promotion is rapidly rising and therefore so is
associated cost of keeping ahead of
competition.
More and more people are devoting more and more time to website promotion and it is becoming a feature of nearly all website promotion campaigns that they are embracing all known search engine promotion techniques instead of exclusively relying on one or two methods.
What we are seeing at
moment is a landshift change in promotion techniques. Only a year or so ago it was thought enough for a search engine optimisation company to optimise
pages (on page optimisation) and submit
website.
However now that
competition is becoming ever fiercer off page optimisation is becoming a necessary requirement of any respectable website promotion campaign.
Let’s examine these two terms and see what we mean my “on page optimisation” and “off page optimisation”.
On page optimisation is
process of tuning
page for a search engine or more usually trying to make it rank highly on a selection of search engines. It’s no wonder that many search engine optimisation engineers focus on google exclusively as it certainly produces
most traffic of all engines, but will that always be
case? Things can change quickly in internet land.
Page optimisation strategies generally consist of using your keyword or keyword phrases in all of
pages known “hotspots”. The page title, meta keyword, meta description, alt tags, first heading and
body text. Subsequent “tweaks” can include bolding
keyword phrase, using
keyword phrase in a hyperlink and more.
To a point there is only so much that you can do to search engineer a page before it starts to look spammy, repeating
keyword phrase over and over. Of course some “optimisers” still do this but it’s quickly becoming a frowned upon practice as it detracts sharply from a website wanting to produce a professional image, not to mention your chances of being banned from
search engine altogether.
This is where “off page optimisation” takes over.
Both Google and Yahoo use a system of “ranking” websites dependent on several factors - one of which is how relevant
content appears to be to
keyphrase searched for (on page optimisation).
The second important criteria that your pages are judged on is how “popular” those pages are in comparison with your competition. Broken down into it’s basest form it means that
more quality votes (links) that your page has then
more popular it must be and so is promoted higher up
search engine results. In google parlance this feature is known as “pagerank” and pagerank is a vitally important part of your website promotion campaign. If you don’t have any then you are standing naked in front of everybody and that’s not a nice feeling!
Google pagerank is based on a scale of 1-10 where 10 has
most influence. The algorithm is configured on a sliding scale so that you only ever gain pagerank as a percentage of
full amount. As those with
highest pagerank are constantly adding more “votes” for their pages it makes sense that those at
bottom end of
scale are going to have to work ever harder to play “catch up” and that is where
extra cost is being factored in to website promotion campaigns.