OnPage SEO & Off Page SEO for beginners...

What is On Page SEO?OnPage SEO is to optimize your web pages in a way that a search engine can find you and rank you well. If you are completely new to SEO, I would recommend you to read Search Engine Optimization For Dummies. Here are some OnPage SEO tips for your site.

1. Keyword in Domain Name - Use keyword in your domain name. [Importance: 2/5]

2. Keyword in File Name - Use keyword in your file names [Importance: 5/5]

3. Page Title - Use keywords in your page title and have around 40 – 60 characters in the Title tag. [Importance: 3/5]

4. Meta Keywords - Use keywords in Meta Keywords. It is recommended to have around 5 – 12 words in the Meta Keywords tag. [Importance: 3/5]

5. Meta Description - Use keywords in Meta Description [Importance: 5/5]

6. Body Tag - You should have your keywords across your main page. [Importance: 5/5]

7. Keywords near the top of the page - Google treat the keywords near the top of the page to be more important than the ones at the bottom. It is recommended to have your keyword to appear near the top of the your website preferably within the first 450 characters. [Importance: 5/5]

8. IMG ALT Tag - Each IMG tag should have an ALT attribute. [Importance: 2/5]

9. Header (H1) - Header tag is one of the most important tag in your web page. You should definitely include your main keyword in the header. [Importance: 5/5]

10. H2 & H3 - Use H2 and H3 headers for your sub keywords. [Importance: 3/5]

11. B and I tag (Bold & Italic) - Use bold or italic fonts to highlight your keyword. [Importance: 2/5]

12. Keyword Density - Keyword density is the percentage ratio of your keyword relative to other words in a page. Suppose you have a web page with 400 words, and you use your keyword 10 times, the keyword density would be 2.5% because because 10 is 2.5 percent of 400. It is recommended that you have a keyword density of 3-10% on your web page. [Importance: 4/5]

13. Robots.txt - It is good to have a robots.txt file for your site to block unimportant links such as "contact", "feedback" pages. [Importance: 1/5]

14. Sitemap.xml - You should always create a Sitemap.xml for your site with all the links in it. If you are using wordpress, install Google XML Sitemaps to create sitemap automatically. [Importance: 2/5]

15. Internal Links - Create internal links for each post on your blog or site. [Importance: 3/5]

What is Off Page SEO?- Off Page SEO is a way for webmasters to build backlinks to their site and rank well in Google or any other search engines. Here are some ways to build backlinks.

1. Forum Posting - participate in forums that are related to your niche and have a signature that links to your site. Please do not spam or advertise your site on the forum as you will get banned easily. Try to help out others and provide something useful to the community and they will click on your signature to visit your site. So you get backlinks and traffic at the same time.

2. Blog Commenting - Comment on other people's blog that are related to your niche. If you are an active commenter on a high traffic blog, you will get a lot traffic in addition to the backlinks you are getting. Please do not use auto commenting software as those comments always get deleted by the blog owners.

3. Article Marketing - Submit articles to Ezine and other directories. If you are article is good enough, you will get a lot of traffic to your site.

4. Social Network Marketing - Connect with other marketers and potential customers through twitter, facebook and other social networking sites to promote your blog and get backlinks.

5. Directory Submission - Submit your site to directories

6. News Announcements and Press Releases

7. Link Exchange - Exchange links with other webmasters. I personally don't use this method. I always try to use 3 way linking.