Although we’ve all heard that content is king—and this is certainly true in many ways—remember that a page can be completely satisfying, readable and incredibly interesting, however if it is not bringing in visitors your website could languish and die. In short, even the most compelling content will not make your website successful on its own, although it should definitely be one of your primary goals when setting up a site. Generally speaking, the purpose of any one page on your site should be to bring in visitors, rank well, and convert visitors through sales or reader satisfaction.

While it is true that a fabulous, well-written, informative article will bring in a certain amount of natural links, and will also satisfy your readers, it will not get you the ranking and traffic you are looking for. In other words, the king and queen should work companionably together to make your website a smashing success—they both have a specific and necessary role to play, and ideally should integrate those roles to further your site.

What Does Google Think?
The general belief is that Google values content over links, however a Google developer was heard to say that incoming links from authority sites carry more weight with Google than strict on-page optimization. Other authorities speculate that Google looks equally at content and links, however Google does operate under the assumption that webmasters will only link to other sites if they find them to be highly relevant or helpful. Those who understand the power of linking, however may be taking part in link exchange programs, using links purely as a tool to gain the best rankings.

Once Google’s complicated algorithm takes this into consideration, content may take on a new importance in judging relevance. In other words, not only will the content on your own page be judged for its relevance, but the content from your links will also be judged in your final rankings. Rumor has it that anchor text has ceased to count as highly in Google’s calculations unless the text you are using in the link appears on the page being linked to. Because of this, remember to always use your target keywords in your site content, and ensure your incoming links also contain those words.

The King and Queen Must Live Harmoniously
SEO best practices dictate that quality content and links must live together in harmony for true success. This means your goal is to create the perfect balance of superior copy and high-quality, relevant links which will boost your rankings. All great content and no links will leave you floating around cyberspace where users will be unable to find you. On the other hand, lots of links with truly dreadful or even mediocre copy will allow people to find you—then they will wish they hadn’t.

Remember—the Right Kind of Links is Crucial
Organic links are what you are looking for in your quest for website success. Trying to fool the system through questionable link building techniques-such as using spam links from link farms or buying massive quantities of low-quality links—will flag your site to Google who will likely penalize you for such black hat practices.

No Copied Content Allowed
Quality content is unique and informative, and never, ever, duplicated from another site. Spun copy can also bring penalties to your website. And really, do you want to be known for low-quality or copied content when you are marketing and promoting your site and your brand? The bottom line is—don’t choose between content and links. Use them both, use them wisely and sit back and bask in your success.

Search engine optimization techniques can change as quickly as the weather, and what you learned—and put into practice—today, may be outdated by tomorrow. Unless you are an avid reader of all the latest SEO practices, you could easily lag behind in the race for newer, better, more productive SEO methods. On-page SEO concerns what search engine spiders can glean about your site through the content and structure of your website. On-page SEO will have you looking at your keyword selections as well as how your meta and ALT tags are used to your advantage. On-page SEO encompasses internal links, content, keyword density and site maps. Off-page SEO, however, refers to activities which are conducted away from your own website, such as the number of inbound links from other websites—also known as backlinks.

Why are Inbound Links Important?
Search engines use inbound links as a method of establishing trust, determining relevancy and gauging the popularity of your site. The more websites which the search engine finds which are linking back to your site the higher your own web pages will rank. Because of the vast amount of websites delivering low-quality content, Google has attempted to minimize this through inbound link perusal. The theory is that if other high quality websites are linking to your site, they apparently believe it to be worthy and credible.

Start a Blog
Blogging is one of the primary—not to mention the most powerful—ways to promote your company online. If you write a blog which includes huge amounts of unique and informative content that others in your niche will find helpful, interesting or even amazing, you have taken a very important step in off-page SEO. You can promote your blog through posting your own comments in other blogs within your niche or service-related blogs which allow links in the comment section, just don’t go overboard.

Commenting on other’s blog sites in your area of expertise will also increase the chances of others visiting your blog so long as you always leave your URL site when you comment. Blog commenting can generate valuable backlinks much more effectively than you might imagine, but take the time to really read the other person’s blogs, and make intelligent and provocative comments.

Help Crawlers Find Your Content
Keep the titles and descriptions for your webpages as clear and relevant as possible. Search engine spiders have a memory of sorts, so the first impression of your website is critical. It’s better to put your best foot forward from the very beginning, rather than to try and go back later and re-work pages in an attempt to convince the spiders to give you another look. Help search engines find your content through sitemaps and lots of relevant internal links, and make sure your URL strings are not full of garbage.

Register your Website in Lots of Web Directories
You want maximum visibility for your website, and website directories are a bit like the yellow pages in that they allow visitors to find your information. You will place a link in the directories back to your site, so that visitors who are searching for information can read about your site. Being registered in web directories also lends credence and authority to your site.

Using Social Media to Your Advantage
Social networking sites can be great places for gaining fans, friends and followers, not to mention making valuable business contacts and expanding your network. Facebook is the leader of the pack, although many businesses also incorporate Twitter and LinkedIn into their social media off-page SEO.

There are many more off-page strategies such as advertising using Google Adwords to promote your site, participating in forum posting in your niche, targeting an audience through the use of a press release, exchanging links with reputable webmasters and article submission, to name a few. Start slowly and work your way through a few of them and you will be amazed at how quickly your site will climb the ranks and how successful it will be in attracting highly targeted traffic.

While some SEO tactics are simply ineffective, others can be considered downright unethical, although you obviously want to avoid both types. SEO practices which are considered less than ethical are known as “black hat” techniques (as opposed to “white hat” SEO techniques which are not only acceptable but desirable). The ineffective SEO techniques take your time and money, yet produce only short-term results, so you want to guard against them as well.

Commonly Used Less-Than-Ethical SEO Techniques
A link farm is a group of websites which have been created with no other purpose than to generate backlinks to other sites. These sites have absolutely no useable content of their own, rather they simply sell links to those who are attempting to add links to their website and increase their rankings. This is an SEO technique which is simply not worth it for a variety of reasons. Not only are you required to shell out money for the links, but as soon as Google—or any other search engine—recognizes the site as a link farm they will ignore all the links, and may even penalize you for using such a low-level technique.

Cross-linking is also considered an unethical practice, and consists of one person having multiple websites, and linking between them—for the sole purpose of creating links. While it can be perfectly acceptable to occasionally link one of your sites to another, creating sites which have no value in themselves simply to be able to add another link is not only a waste of your money, but just like link farming can end up getting you penalized. There is virtually no reason to engage in cross-linking when you can easily get links simply from writing high quality articles and posting them on your primary website.

Cloaking your website involves returning altered website pages to the spiders which crawl your site while your human readers see something entirely different. The goal of cloaking is to improve your search engine rankings by misleading search engines into thinking your content is different than what it actually is. It’s much easier simply to optimize your content to begin with than to risk having your site removed or blacklisted when the cloaking is discovered. Any site that appears differently to a search engine than to the human eye will be deemed to be engaging in cloaking, preventing the search engines from effectively doing their job—and costing you dearly.

Keyword stuffing is also frowned upon by search engines, but more importantly can alienate your readers. Inserting a large number of keywords into your content and meta tag in an attempt to increase your site’s rankings and bring more traffic to your website—artificially—is known as keyword stuffing and it is considered unethical, and, in some cases can be considered an attack technique. This means the keyword stuffing is used to send traffic to websites which are considered fraudulent or even malicious. Keywords may also be hidden in the content through matching the font color to the background, or putting the keywords behind an image. Google’s increasingly sophisticated algorithms have enabled it to quickly identify irrelevant terms as well as to spot keywords which are clearly out of context or simply overused. Google may remove a site completely if they detect the use of keyword stuffing, so don’t do it. Use your keywords wisely, but always make sure they make sense within the context of the content.

Don’t waste your valuable resources engaging in unethical or black hat SEO techniques, rather take the time to set your site up correctly right from the beginning, and only use time-proven, high quality, ethical practices which will move your site up the ranks slower, but steadily, without the potential for penalties or banishment.

The battle continues to range as to whether on-page SEO is better than off-page SEO. If you are a bit fuzzy on exactly where the difference lies, off-page SEO generally refers to items which are outside your site—link generation programs and social media efforts to name just a couple. On-page SEO refers to the specific copy on your website, whether or not your website design is SEO friendly, and the code, title tags, meta descriptions, meta keywords and internal linking which appear on your website and are crucial to your site’s success.

On-page SEO is absolutely necessary in order for your website to reach its full potential, and truthfully, if you have a website which has been successfully live for several years, possesses very deep, well-structured, quality content, then a bit of tweaking may well be enough to make your website as successful as you desire. On the other hand, if your website is a relative newcomer to the Internet, then it is highly likely you are going to have to jump into the off-page factors if you want to be recognized as a quality site.

What Can On-Page SEO Do For You?

On-page SEO can enable each page within your website to rank highly for a particular, prominent keyword or key phrase. On-page SEO can allow you to prioritize which pages within your website are of higher importance based on their navigational structure and internal links. Finally, on-page SEO can give a page rank based on a portion of the links from off-page ranking factors.

What Can Off-Page SEO Do For You?

Off-page SEO can, to some extent, compensate for flaws within your site’s pages, as well as for less competitive keywords. Excellent off-page SEO can bring a brand new site to the first page in a Google search in a matter of weeks. Off-page SEO can keep your most important web pages at the top of the search engines by virtue of link quality and relevance, and finally, off-page SEO develops authority for your site and the pages within it.

Challenges of a New Site

If you have only recently launched your website, then there is a chance it may be lacking content as well as high quality links to your site. In order to develop your site’s SEO as quickly as possible, it’s imperative that you present exceptionally high-quality content which is of value to your readers rather than tons of marketing fluff. Blogs are an especially great way to create quick, meaningful content for your site’s visitors, and the best blogs gain quickly in popularity, bringing traffic in to your website. The more quality content on your site, the more likely readers will find something they want to link to, so consistent posting of great content is key.

Challenges of an Old Site Which is Largely Un-optimized

Suppose you have a relative older site which has never been thoroughly optimized even though it’s been on line for two, three, four or more years. Even better, assume this site has always had tons of quality content as well as authority with the search engines. Truth be told, you are sitting on the Hope Diamond of search engines. By simply tweaking your on-page SEO, and incorporating a relatively few off-page SEO techniques, you may soon find your site the rock star of the Internet.

Which is Better?

Many SEO experts believe that the best website rankings may come from mixture of approximately 60% on-page SEO tactics and 40% off-page SEO tactics, although in some cases links alone have been known to push a page straight to the top. The age and authority of your website, combined with the quality of your links as well as your supporting, high-quality content are all factors in determining how much time and energy you need to devote to on or off-page SEO.