On-page vs. Off-page

[geckophinator]

I am the Customer Support and QA specialist for a small custom software company. We also are the designers and webmasters for a few dozen customer sites.

I've been tasked with becoming the resident expert on SEO.

As I look back through our existing sites, I see that most are really poorly designed from an SEO perspective.

My question is this... just how important is on-page SEO vs. off-page SEO (like obtaining back-links from high PR sites)?

I saw a couple comments from some people that hint that BLs from high PR sites are the best thing that can be done. In that case, it puts a great deal of SEO out of our hands. Our customers are more responsible for seeking out and obtaining links from external sites.

Greg

[jocelyn]

Both are almost useless without the other. If you have a poor page but good links, or the opposite, obviously the result will not be as good as if both were great. If the keywords are competitive you will need both to be well optimized if you want to hit the 1st page.

[owlcroft]

There are many opinions on the relative importance of each element: some say "content is king", others say that backlinks are virtually everything. And each side can produce at least some evidence for its case.

As Jocelyn says, the thing to do is to control as much as you can control. Do as much on-site SEO as reasonably practical--and don't forget that making it very, very easy to link to your pages is an important part of on-site work, even if it relates to off-site things (that would mean putting a "to link to this page" line with an exact URL and anchor text--all as HTML, ready to cut and paste--that you would like used).

You will find an elementary but perhaps useful introduction to and overview of on-site SEO
at this "SEO Tips" page (http://seo-toys.com/tips-on-seo/seo-tips-1.shtml).

[blackstar]

tell me more about the Via dangling link tool... :o

[seo guy]

IMO it is virtually inpossible to achieve rankings with onpage alone, however it is possible to achieve rankings with offpage alone thus is I only had the choice to do one, I would choose to focus on off page as it is more important... however! We all have the time to do both and I say do both. There is no data on what percent is x and what percent is y but for me (And this is not imperical just how I would attribute effort) I would give 65-70% to offpage and 30-35% to onpage and thus would apply my time spend on SEO in that fashion. Thats just me. However I dont think creating useful content is SEO (The modifying of it is), and thus any content creation (For your users not the SE's) is not taken into account and you should always make efforts to offer as much as possible

[Nick0r]

Actually, I think you can rank really well in yahoo with just onpage. I don't think links even come into the equation. Keyword density, alt text and a few other attributes are what gets ranks in Yahoo.

[seo guy]

I dissagree I think links play a role in Yahoo algo

[owlcroft]

[QUOTE=blackstar]tell me more about the Via dangling link tool... :o[/QUOTE]It's a simple little toy. It is a tiny php script that you put where convenient (I suggest the root, to keep the URL length down). You then block it in your robots.txt file. Those two things done, you can "hide" any outbound link by writing it in this general form--
<a href="http://www.mywonderfulsite.com/via.php?passing=urliamlinking.html">

--where, of course mywonderfulsite.com is your site's domain and urliamlinking.html is something like www.paintredcatsblue.com/paints/colors/aqua.html or whatever.

The bot sees that link in your page, but cannot follow it, as its target, the php script, is blocked to it. So it registers as a "dangling link", which is to say no link at all.

People can, and often do, use such schemes to pretend they are giving back links to other sites but not in reality doing so. That is wildly unethical. There are, though, certainly times when one wants to link to someplace--perhaps Amazon.com--that neither wants, needs, nor expects a link except for its functionality.

An often-overlooked use, though, is in controlling internal linkage within your own site. If, as many do, you want to concentrate all possible PR in your front page at the expense of all subsidiary pages (sometimes wise, sometimes not, cases vary), then you want, ideally, your index page to link each other page on your site--so the bots can be sent to them--and each other page to link to the front page only, and no others. For many reasons, that is rarely practical, but by using a link hider you can provide all the intra-site links you want while still preserving that structure as far as the bots are concerned.

(A perhaps better scheme is the index page linking solely to a site-directory page, which then links all the other pages.)

There are docfiles with the toy, so you needn't save this. You can find it on my site at the "Via" SEO toy (http://seo-toys.com/link-hide-seo-toy/via-toy.shtml).

[Searched]

you think google would penalize for using this way of linking. I emailed them weeks back with no response

[clasione]

[QUOTE=jocelyn]Both are almost useless without the other. If you have a poor page but good links, or the opposite, obviously the result will not be as good as if both were great. If the keywords are competitive you will need both to be well optimized if you want to hit the 1st page.[/QUOTE]


Hit the nail on the head.....

Best answer you could have gotten....