Achieving Organic SEO

Achieving organic SEO can take a few months from my personal experience, I mean you could start ranking for less popular keywords in a few weeks, like geographically targeted keywords or less searched or popular keywords that don’t have a lot of competition.

You can spend a lot of time working on all the necessary aspects of your site and find out you still don’t rank in the top 30 search engine results.

That is why you could really use some pay-per-click at the beginning with the combination of organic SEO. That is a really powerful combination if you can convert your visitors into money or profit. If you don’t then you should ask yourself why should I do pay per click at all.

Though organic SEO is good, adding the extra, more costly programs can be what you need to push your site right to the top of the SERPs.

A good first step in search engine optimization is to ensure that the organic elements of your site are as optimized as possible. Here are a few of those elements you should focus on.

Web-site content is one of the most highly debated elements in search engine optimization, mostly

because many rather unethical SEO users have turned to black-hat SEO techniques, such as keyword

stuffing to try to artificially improve search engine ranking. When you come to a black hat site you can quickly find out that that site is not made for visitors to find any useful info, you see all kind of stuffed keywords, comment spamming, overuse of external linking to nonrelated site.

And for sure a site like that will not give a real user any positive experience. The content on your site is the main draw for visitors. Whether your site sells products or simply provides information about services, what brings visitors to your site is the words on the page. Product descriptions, articles, blog, and few advertisements are all scanned by spiders and crawlers as when they visit your site periodically.

These crawlers check your content with other related elements on your site (like links and meta tags). To rank high in a SERPS, your content must be relevant to those other elements.

Another important aspect is unique content because some search engines will de-list your page or lower your page rank if the content of your site is not unique and is simply copied from other sites.

Especially since the new era of blogs, search engines now are examining how frequently the content on pages is updated and looking for content that appears only on your website. This doesn’t mean you can’t have static content on your page. For e-commerce sites, the product descriptions may rarely change.

But including other elements on the page, like reviews or product updates, will satisfy a crawler’s
requirement that content change regularly. And that is a big plus for your ranking.

Another element you have to be careful about is when building content on your site are the keywords that you plan to use. Ideally, your chosen keywords should appear on the page few times, but the over usage cold lower your ranking.

Keywords are part of your site content, and as such require special attention. In fact, the selectionof the right keywords is not easy to master and requires real SEO skills.For example if you sell spare parts for plasma tv selecting “plasma tv” for your keyword might not be the perfect choice.

It is vital that you understand what keywords is the right audience using that will come to your site and buy your spare parts. The better keyword would be for example “spare parts plasma tv”. Usually you should just optimize your site for several plasma brands or products and add your keywords like for example spare parts, plasma repair…………

Try experimenting with keywords to see which one work. You can get several good programs to track your site like Google analytics for example to track the keywords that most often lead users to your site. Learning which keyword will be most effective for your site will require that you study your audience, but it also requires some trial and error.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free web site statistics program that is used to track all kind of elements on your site. The only thing you need to do is to sign up on this address http://www.google.com/analytics and pt some code on your site and you can start tracking your traffic.

Google Analytics can also be used with Google Adwords to provide the right keyword tracking and information.

Internal and external links

Another very important element of organic SEO are links on your pages. Links can be incoming, outgoing, or internal. And where those links lead or come from is as important as the context in which the links are provided. Many SEOs including me claim that links are the most important factors for search engines.

When links first became criteria by which crawlers ranked websites, many black-hat SEO users rushed to create so called link farms.

These were pages full of nothing but web links, some of which led to relevant information and some of which led to sites in no way related to the topic of the web site. It didn’t take long for search engine designers and programmers to catch on to these shady practices and change the way that crawlers use links to rank sites.

Today, links must usually be related to the content of the page, and they must link to something relevant to that content. SO you have to get links to relevant sites.

Here is an example, links to a health site from a computer site are less valuable than the links from a health site to a health site.

You also have to be careful how many links do you have on the page, or you could be possibly marked as a link farmer.

Your best option when including links on your website is to link to the pages you know for sure are relevant to your site content. Don’t include a link unless you’re sure it will have value to your users, and then take the time to pursue links into your site from them as well.

One other type of link, the internal link, is also important. This is a navigational link that leads users from one page to another on your site. The navigation of your site (which is what these links are, essentially) should be intuitive, and natural in progression. And you should also include a site map.

Your site map not only makes it easier for crawlers to index every page of your site, but it also makes it easier for users to find their way around in it. Ideally, users will never have to rely on the site map; however, it’s nice for it to be there in the event that they either need it or simply want to click directly to the page they’re seeking. So a site map could help search engine bots and also visitors find the content.

The user experience by my opinion the hardest element to master but is really an essential one. User experience means that you provide users what they are looking for, so they will possibly bookmark your site, tell their friends about your site and give you incoming links and basically increase your rankings.

So, how in the world can a site gain search engine ranking by user experience? It’s fairly simple really. Search engines today are smarter than they have ever been. Search engines can track of what results users click when they run a search. Those result selections are essential to add to the organic ranking of your site.

Here’s a scenario. Say you search for something like health-insurance information. When the search results come up, how are you going to choose which results to look at? Most users read the small descriptive lines that are included with the search engine ranking and select from those. In most cases, the sites that are visited are those sites that are highest in the rankings. But search engines also monitor which sites are actually clicked on, so let’s say you search through the results and click a link on the fifth page. And suppose several other people do so as well.

That link on the fifth page is going to show more traffic than links that are higher in the results, so smart search engines will move that page higher in the rankings. It may not jump right up to the number one position, but it’s entirely possible for the site to move from the fifth page of rankings to the second or third. This is part of the equation used when user experience is taken into consideration.

Another part of that experience might be how quickly the user jumps back to the search page. Maybe
when you click that link on the fifth page, you can tell when you hit the site that it’s not the page you were looking for (or doesn’t contain the information or product that you were looking for). You click the back button, and you’re taken back to the page of search results.

This is called bounce, and the rate at which users bounce off your site is an indicator of the usability of the site in terms of how relevant it is to what users are searching for. This relates directly to the keywords the user searched for, which relates directly to how your site matches those keywords.

To maximize the usability of your site, make sure the keywords you choose and the description of your page are as accurate as possible.

It may take some time for you to learn how to combine all these elements especially when it comes to elements like descriptions and keywords. I am telling you to experiment, use different combinations of words in keywords and descriptions.

Today many users search for websites to learn more about products, services etc. However, there’s much more to websites today than just text on a screen. We now live in the Interactive Age. Most of us want to interact with the websites we’re visiting. That interaction might take the form of a poll, the ability to comment on a blog post, the downloading of a file, or even a game that relates to the site content. No matter what the type of interaction, users expect it, and search crawlers look for it.

Site interactivity is essential to achieving a high SEO ranking. Sure, you can garner a high ranking without interaction, bit it won’t happen nearly as fast, and the ranking will likely be lower than that f a site that has some form of interaction with the user.

Why is interaction so important? Simple. If you can influence a user to interact with your site, you have more of a chance of gaining a goal conversion. Goal conversions are the completion of some form of activity designed to gather further information about your user. A goal conversion can be something as simple as enticing users to sign up for a newsletter, or it can be more specific, like persuading them to make purchases.

No matter what goal conversion you’re seeking, the way to achieve it is through interactivity. And the more frequently the user interacts with your site, the more likely it is that this person will reach that goal conversion page that you’re monitoring so closely.

Goal conversion is the purpose of many web sites. For example, the target goal conversion for an e-commerce web site might be for the user to make a $25 purchase. If you can entice a user to purchase from your site — that is, meet the goal conversion — you have more of a chance of getting them back to your site for a future purchase, to find additional information, or simply to interact with your site some more.

All of these are important aspects of your website’s traffic patterns. And search engines will look for elements of interactivity to judge the value of your site to users. One goal of search engines is to provide value to users.

Those users turn to the search engine for help in finding something specific. Just as it’s important for your site to land high in the search results, it’s important for the search engine to provide the information that a user seeks within the first page or two.

Making the user happy is one-way search companies make their money. Another way is through the dollars that advertisers will pay to have their pages ranked high in the search results or their advertisements shown according to the keywords for which the user was searching.

In other words, search engine optimization is a two-way street. It’s also a business, and search engine companies are always trying to find ways to improve their business. For that reason, these elements, and many others, are an essential part of search engine optimization.

Organic SEO is certainly not easy to achieve. One way to achieve it is to have a solid SEO plan that outlines where you are and what needs to be added to your site design or content to make it more visible to users. It also takes a lot of time and effort to create and implement the right SEO plan.