Organic Search Engine Optimization is a process that is used to drive traffic to your website by improving the site’s ranking on Search Engine Result Pages (SERP’s) naturally – Naturally implies optimizing your website using SEO techniques. This will trigger the search engine algorithms to rank your page higher on the results pages based on your website’s relevancy to that particular search term or phrase. Building your website organically is usually based on three key factors: Site Structure, Content, and Links. Improving your SERP’s on major search engines such as Yahoo, Bing and Google will improve your website and total sales as quality traffic will result in a better ROI. If your website has been online for 6 months or more and you are not receiving traffic or very little – It is safe to say that your site is not optimized for the search engines. Hiring a SEO consultant might be your next step: An SEO expert is not going to come cheap. If you are strap for cash, you can optimize your website on your own by learning about Search Engine Optimization. Some of these principles and practices will be covered in this article to help you get started.
Site Structure
Just like building a house, a great website that is SEO optimized is built on a solid foundation so that search engine crawlers can crawl every section of your website and will do so on a regular basis. There are some keys things that you should consider when building your website structure: Page titles, URL links, Text links, Page load time and Header Tags. One of the first things that will help get a website SEO optimized is having a very good page title with keywords relevant to what your site is offering. This is very important, especially to search engines like Google. It is important that you do not try to stuff your page titles with every keyword that you can think of. It is virtually impossible to try and optimize your home page for every keyword. Majority of search engines will only index about 60 characters from your website page titles. You are better off optimizing each page on your website with different keywords that are relevant to your website. Quite a few website online today use image links but they forget to accompany them with text links. Text links allow search engine spiders to navigate through your website from page to page – This is something you want to happen as search engine spiders do follow image links. Using friendly URL links is another good practice to implement. While search engines spiders have gotten better at reading query string URL’s such as “http://domain.com/page.php?id=5&item=redshirt”. It is much better to have a URL in the form of “http://domain.com/red-shirt”: This is more pleasant to the human eye and also has more relevance to search engines. Slow And Steady Wins The Race: This is one of the few times that this does apply, having a webpage that takes too long to load does go well with search engines. Search engines hate slow loading pages. You want make you take every step to optimize your web pages so that they load quickly. Furthermore, another key practice to implement in your website structure is to use Header tags to let the search engines know that the page is relevant and should be weighted heavily with importance. In most cases many pages will have more than one headline. Additional headings should bolded to look the way they do.
Content
Time and time again the phrase, “Content is King” has been mentioned in world of Search Engine Optimization. It is a well known fact by SEO experts that good quality content will always bring high quality traffic back to your website. You are more likely to get sales and a better ROI from good quality traffic. A good practice to have is to update and add new content to your website on a regular basis. One method of creating new content for your site is to add a blog. Search engines love new content and especially good content that is relevant. How often you add new content to your site will depend on how often your other competitors are adding new content. The content on your website should not make your site sound phony or boring. Your customers will appreciate good content and quality will make them more willing to do business with you. Also, when writing content for your website you should think about writing for your customers and the search engines: Use relevant keywords in your website content. A common practice is to repeat keywords in your content that already exist in your page titles and H1 tags. Having good quality and relevant content on your website will surely improve your site’s ranking in the SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages).
Links
It seems that having relevant backlinks (or inbound links) linking back to your website is very important and even more so today. These backlinks count as votes for your website. Part of the search engines ranking system is to check who is voting (linking back) for you. When it comes to inbound links, it is not about the quantity, it is about having quality pages and site’s linking back to your website. You can 40 sites linking to your website, but if they a poor quality sites or websites that have been penalized – Your site is at risked of also getting penalized just by having that association. An easy way of building up the number of back-links for your website is to write and submit good quality articles to article directories. Good quality articles have a better chance of getting republished by other websites and Ezines. The more times your article gets republished, the inbound links to your site will also increase.
If you have made it this far, you should now realize how important search engine optimization is when it comes to getting traffic to your website. This article has only covered a small section of SEO practices. If you would like learn more about Search Engine Optimization, a good start would be at Search Commander: You can start by reading SEO-101. Whether or not you decide to use an SEO consultant or decide to optimize your website on your own, it is going to take time to get your page up to par in the SERP’s.
