SEO activity can be divided in to two broad categories, offsite SEO and onsite SEO.
Onsite SEO refers to all the methods used in the design and presentation of your site in order to boost its appeal to search engines and indexing. Onsite SEO includes adjusting many factors that can increase the quality of information search engines obtain when visiting your site. There is no magic formula for these elements, but using them all appropriately can lead to significant improvements in search engine rankings. Onsite SEO factors include (but are not limited to):
1. Check for broken links within your site.
2. Choice of text within HTML META description tag. This should be unique for each page on your site.
3. Choice of text within HTML title tags. This should be unique for each page on your site.
4. Strong relevant internal linking. Breadcrumb style sub-navigation on pages can strengthen internal linking.
5. Choice of text within HTML h# tags (for example, <h1> or <h3> tags). Do not overuse h1 tags, use one per page.
6. Customize 404 pages to include links back to principal areas of your site’s navigation structure.
7. Keyword density within HTML body tags. Historically, a density of 3% to 5% evenly distributed on pages of over 200 words was thought to be near optimal, although this is near impossible to objectively assess.
8. Use Keywords in HTML <strong> tags.
9. Use an up-to-date XML sitemap.
10. Use an up-to-date HTML sitemap.
11. Place target keywords high up on the page.
12. Use unique and relevant HTML ALT tags on all images.
Offsite SEO refers to the process used to improve search engine rankings by maximizing the influence of factors outside your site’s home domain. For example: building relevant inbound links from other domains/sites. The principal object of offsite SEO is quality link building. Link building has evolved to become a full and separate discipline within SEO. Ordinarily, onsite SEO should be undertaken before proceeding to offsite SEO efforts and are usually quicker and easier to perform. Offsite SEO efforts are usually divided in to mid- to long-term projects as it takes time to build up a sizable amount of back links.