A Guide To Organic SEO And Its Benefits

What Is Organic SEO?

Put in the simplest manner possible, organic SEO is search engine optimization done manually using no black hat methods, no underhand methods and no automated scripting. It is the purest form of optimizing your website for the benefit of search engines, while still retaining interest for your site visitors, and done well it is exactly the thing that search engines are looking for in a website. Once they find it they will reward your site with better rankings and improved positions within the search engine results pages. Throughout the course of this article it will be referred to as simply SEO.

Understanding The Search Engines

Understanding Search Engines and their general concept is vital to the use of effective SEO methods. Search engines enable their visitors to enter a specific word or term, known as keywords. Once submitted, all pages containing those keywords that can be found in the search engine’s directory are listed on the search engine result pages. Each page is “ranked” according to relevancy, popularity and a few other factors. Therefore, in theory, the more relevant a page is to a given keyword the more likely it will appear at the top of the listings.

Introducing The Search Engine Spiders

Another important factor to remember about search engines is that they don’t use real people to crawl the billions of websites and judge how relevant they are. Instead they use automated software called a “spider” or a “bot” that does this work much quicker. The calculations that the search engine uses to determine the ranking of a website are called algorithms and in the case of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN these algorithms are changed on a regular basis. The changes and the specifics of the algorithms are not released to the public in order to prevent black hat SEOs from manipulating their sites to reach the top of the pile despite containing to information relevant to the search query or keyword.

Optimizing For Search Engines – Optimizing For Visitors

Of course to some extent, all of us reading this article are probably guilty of altering our web pages to meet the whims of search engines but it must be done in a positive and organic way. We understand that optimizing a page purely for the benefit of search engines spiders may massively detract from the actual value of the site to your visitors. Search engines understand this too, hence the evolution of the algorithms. With each new algorithm created and usually patented by search engines like Google, we are getting closer to a structure whereby sites are genuinely judged on their value to visitors. It may sound like an Isaac Asimov novel but the algorithms and the spiders are basically becoming more human like.

Basic Components Of SEO

The actual methods of optimizing your website are saved for another article, but the basic components of an SEO campaign are broken down into on page and off page optimization techniques. On page SEO includes factors like keyword inclusion, content optimization, page structure etc… whereas the main contributing factor of off page optimization is inbound links. There are many different factors to each of these areas and different SEOs will give you varying information on which factors are the most relevant to gain higher rankings. These extensive differences in opinion occur because nobody is certain of the algorithm criteria.

The Benefits Of SEO

SEO is probably the most beneficial way to conduct Internet promotion. It is highly cost effective, can yield long term results and the leads it generates are opt in and targeted. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider trying out alternative methods of advertising your site. For many, banner advertisements, press releases (can actually be used as part of an SEO campaign as well), PPC campaigns and sponsored listings prove to highly beneficial and including these will help your site’s popularity.

To Cost Effectiveness And To Life

The cost effectiveness is easily determined when you look at the potential of an SEO campaign compared to the method that many consider to be the next best thing – PPC. A PPC campaign will usually cost you anywhere upward of 5 cents per visitor generated. This means that for every thousand visitors you receive you will have paid $50. Some fairly basic SEO work on a web site containing ten pages will generate this kind of traffic on a monthly basis relatively quickly.

$50 doesn’t sound much but consider that you pay this in one month to receive the desired one thousand visitors. Over the space of a year you will have paid $600, and so on. Now consider that you are competing for a relatively competitive keyword and you find that you need to be paying a minimum of 50 cents per click to generate just the one thousand clicks in a month. All of a sudden you’re paying $6000 per year and you are still only getting one thousand clicks every month. $6000 will buy you an awful lot of SEO work and you should find that within a few months you are generating a lot more traffic using SEO.

Targeted Leads

Targeted leads are the best type of leads you can generate. It means that the visitors to your site are already predisposed to the basic topic of your site and are interested in what you have to say. It means that they will be more likely to purchase goods or services from your site, click on affiliate links or click Google ads to earn you revenue. Because SEO leads are physically searching for the topic that your site relates to you are guaranteed that they are interested in whatever you’re offering. First of all they search using keywords relevant to your site. They then read the description and name of your site and this further compounds their interest in the page in question and click on the link. Already they have become highly susceptible to the message of your web page.

So Remember…

SEO is a webmaster’s greatest tool but treated badly it can quickly blow up in your face. By ensuring you stick to the very letter of the law and do not use any underhand methods you should soon benefit from powerful leads that will frequent your site and earn you revenue.

The Importance of Search Engines

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. When a topic is typed for search, nearly instantly, the search engine will sift through the millions of pages it has indexed about and present you with ones that match your topic. The searched matches are also ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first.

Remember that a prospective customer will probably only look at the first 2-3 listings in the search results. So it does matter where your website appears in the search engine ranking.

Further, they all use one of the top 6-7 search engines and these search engines attract more visitors to websites than anything else. So finally it all depends on which search engines the customers use and how they rank your site.

It is the Keywords that play an important role than any expensive online or offline advertising of your website.

It is found by surveys that a when customers want to find a website for information or to buy a product or service, they find their site in one of the following ways:
• The first option is they find their site through a search engine.
• Secondly they find their site by clicking on a link from another website or page that relates to the topic in which they are interested.
• Occasionally, they find a site by hearing about it from a friend or reading in an article.

Thus it’s obvious the the most popular way to find a site, by search engine, represents more than 90% of online users. In other words, only 10% of the people looking for a website will use methods other than search engines.

All search engines employ a ranking algorithm and one of the main rules in a ranking algorithm is to check the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Don’t forget that algorithms also give weightage to link population (number of web pages linking to your site). When performed by a qualified, experienced search engine optimization consultant, your site for high search engine rankings really does work, unless you have a lot of money and can afford to pay the expert. With better knowledge of search engines and how they work, you can also do it on your own.

Search engine spiders and your web site

Are you sure that search engines understand your web site? Search engines see your web pages with different eyes than web surfers.

A web page that looks great to the human eye can be totally meaningless to search engines. For example, search engines cannot read the text on the images of your web site, and many don’t understand web languages such as JavaScript or CSS.

If you have a great looking web site that is meaningless to search engines, you won’t be able to achieve high search engine rankings with that web site – no matter how good and interesting your web site content is.

In general, search engines cannot see content that is presented in the following file formats:

• images (GIF, JPEG, PNG, etc.)
• Flash movies, flash banners, etc.
• JavaScript and other script languages
• other multimedia file formats

Some search engines can index some of these file formats but in general, it’s very difficult to obtain high search engine rankings if your main web site content is presented only in these formats.

Search engines need text to index your web site. They cannot know what’s written on your GIF or JPEG images or in your Flash movies. If you use a lot of images on your web site, you should also create some web pages that contain a lot of text.

If you want to find out how search engines see your web site, you have to use a search engine spider simulator tool. A search engine spider simulator tool emulates the software programs search engines use to index your web site. They show you what elements of your web site are visible to search engines.

Top10Optimizer’s search engine spider simulator helps you to find out how search engines see your web site. Top10Optimizer’s  spider simulator even allows you to emulate special search engines spider names so that you can find out if your competitors send different pages to search engine spiders.

Just enter the URL of your web site and Top10Optimizer’s will tell you what text and which links search engines can find on your site.

That allows you to quickly find out whether your web site lacks information that search engines need to properly index your web site.

see sample of Top10Optimizer’s search engine spider simulator reports

JUST ANOTHER A SHORT HISTORY OF SEARCH ENGINES

The Usefulness Algorithm did not always exist.

In the beginning, search engines were well-calibrated to report accurately on the subject matter of each web page. It was simple. Authors of web pages would tell the search engines what the pages were about by what they included in their meta tags. In a fairly academic environment with little competition, this made sense. Who better to define what a web page is about than its own author, right? Search engines could easily rank the relevancy of web pages to a particular query based on the honest declaration of the pages’ authors.

But competition inevitably arose, partly because there were more documents being added to the Web (no longer was there just a single page about neo-thermal induction theory) and partly because commercial interests with a stronger motivation to draw “traffic” started creating web pages. With competition, web page authors started trying to increase their traffic by doctoring the meta tags.

Search engines could no longer trust web page authors to accurately describe their content. The poor search engines had to start reading the pages for themselves to determine what each one was really about.

It wasn’t long before people began doctoring their pages to give them the edge in the rankings. Keyword stuffing, invisible text and a number of other shady tactics still around today, as well as the more acceptable SEO copywriting, were born. Relevance still ruled the rankings; it was simply determined in a different manner.

As the number of web pages that were all extremely relevant for any particular search continued to grow, the search engines needed to distinguish between those that were highly relevant and highly important on the one hand, and those that were highly relevant and pretty unimportant on the other hand. Thus were born two distinct but related approaches that are still very much part of modern search engine algorithms: link popularity and PageRank. (By the time you finish reading this book, these will sound archaic, but they will likely remain part of the algorithms for some time yet.)

Link popularity is a very straightforward accounting of how many links are pointing toward a specific web page. The premise is that the more links pointing to the page, the more important it is. After all, not many people would point links to unimportant websites, but lots of people would point links to important websites. Each link would be like a vote for the webpage it points to. Democracy in action…gotta love the Web.

PageRank, a Google invention, works a lot like link popularity, except that it tries to determine which links are more important. It works on the premise that two doctors recommending a headache medication are probably more reliable than two
lemon pickers. It knows this to be true, because more people have recommended the doctors to their friends and fewer people have recommended the lemon pickers. Less democratic than link-popularity, more accurate a measure of importance (like the U.S. electoral college), not encumbered by any constitutional protection of universal suffrage or mediocrity.

These days, importance and relevance share a somewhat balanced role in search engine rankings (a topic that fuels countless debates amongst SEO specialists), and link-building has become an increasingly important aspect of SEO. A new dimension of relevance was added as the anchor text of a link and the topic of a linking page was considered, something along the premise that a pharmacist saying “Take this headache medication.” carries more weight for buying headache medication than a “This is a purple pill.” from that same pharmacist.

In addition to relevance and importance, the search engines do try to determine credibility or trustworthiness of a web page through a number of means, which may include age of the domain, date of most recent update, TLD (top level domain – for instance, they might consider a .edu or .gov domain more credible), etc.

Why Can't I Get All My Web Pages Indexed By The Search Engines?

Search engine optimization is about paying attention to the basics. From making sure that you vary your anchor text in your inbound links to ensuring that your keyword density is between 2 and 5 percent, it is all about getting the details right. The only other thing required than that is time.

As part of search engine optimization, there is one factor that is often either missed, or not done properly. I’m talking about maintaining a good site layout. There are several very real, money-valuable benefits to having a good site layout.

Search Engine Indexing

Proper layout techniques, such as having a site map and executing a proper, planned linking strategy throughout your website will not only get your pages indexed easily (but not quicker), but in some cases proper linking will squeeze out every last sliver of ‘votes’ towards your important pages. I’ll talk more about site maps and linking strategies later on.

Conversion Rate

A good site layout is all about converting your visitors into customers. By making an easy to- use, uncluttered and user-centric layout, you are increasing the chances of leading your customer to into making the ‘critical move’, whether it is signing up to your newsletter, filling a survey or buying your product.

User Satisfaction

User satisfaction should be central aim when designing a site layout. Put yourself in the shoes of your visitors, and decide what you want from your website. It is a subtle shift in perception, but it will help you decide whether you really need all those extra menu options on the left or if the design could be simplified by placing those extra links at the bottom of the page; out of immediate view, thus reducing clutter and confusion but within reach if the user needs extra information.

A good site layout will improve the image of your website. Don’t just think about search engine rankings – keep your users as your first priority and ensure that your visitors do not go away without being impressed by the clarity and simplicity of your design. Word-of-mouth marketing (either through natural linking or plain blog and forum activity) is a power marketing tool that is largely based on how user-friendly and helpful your website actually is.

Site Map

A site map has been widely proclaimed as the basic linking tool for site-wide search engine optimization, and with good reason. It presents your website’s content – the linking structure of your website – on one single page for search engines and users alike.

Accessibility

Your site map is something like a table of contents for your website. While not the first resort for users looking for information on websites, today’s increasingly-aware user audience will more and more turn to a site map if they cannot find something on your website through the traditional menu structure, or if they need to get somewhere really quickly.

Search Engines

A site map, properly mapped and linked from your home page, is the search engine’s guide to the depth and breadth of your website. When a search engine spider finally decides that your site in interesting (read important) enough to be indexed further, it will start by exploring links on your home page. Through the site map, it gains immediate one-link access to your complete website, and this greatly speeds up the indexing of all your pages.

Even when the spider does not engage in a deep crawl, a two-level initial crawl is not uncommon, and that will invariably give the spider the opportunity to see all the pages. For examples of good site maps, check out the following site maps:

· http://www.google.com/sitemap.html – Google Site Map

· http://pages.ebay.com/sitemap.html – eBay Site Map

· http://www.apple.com/find/sitemap.html – Apple Site Map

Optimal Indexing

To ensure that your website is optimally indexed, there are some specific linking strategies that you need to follow. It is NOT as difficult as you might expect. At the very basic level, there are two things you must take care of.

Template-based web design

Design templates before you start designing your website. Using templates to add new pages to your website will not only bring in consistency, but also allow you to standardize the optimal pattern of in-site linking. This might sound terribly complicated unless you base all pages on a template. With a well-designed template the process is simplified to just updating the placeholder hyperlinks. Then create sub-templates for categories of pages (main category pages, subcategory pages, etc.) to further ease your burden of reconfiguring each page manually.

Site Structure

A template-based design should, apart from speeding up the design process, focus on optimizing your sitewide linking. This will not only with indexing, but also help in increasing SERPS placement due to extra inbound links for your important pages. Base your site structure on solid, site-wide linking strategies like these:

· Each page should link back to the home page.

· Each page should further link back to its main category page.

· Each category page should provide clear links to any sub categories.

· If possible, each page should have the main menu structure – so as to give maximum link exposure to the most important pages of your website.

· Each page should further link to those important pages on your website that do not have any clear category (privacy policy, Help section, user guide, search page, members section, etc.).

If your template is properly designed and as mentioned earlier you specialize your template into subtemplates, your site structure will become more defined and manageable, and your linking strategy will help in both improving the search engine indexing and increasing your rankings.

Reality Check

Don’t spend more time than necessary on site structure a

How Web Directory Listings Play A Big Part In Your Search Engine Success

A search engine’s goal is to provide its users the best solution available from all the webpages stored within its index. So how do search engines work out if your webpage is the best solution to their users’ queries? That is, rank your site at the top of its search results.

Well, unlike humans who are sold on emotions, search engines are sold on cold hard data. There are two sources of data that web directories rely on to determine the ranking of a website:

1. The first source is internal, or the data a search engine spider extracts from a webpage. The internal data search engine spiders collect include keyword phrases, keyword frequency, density, proximity and prominence, page length, keywords in various HTML and Meta tags and, so on.

2. The second data source is external data, or data and events not entirely under the site author’s direct control. These include link popularity, click through popularity, and site listings in popular web directories, such as the Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project. The first source of data is often manipulated and abused, so search engines have increasingly begun to rely on the second data source.

At present, search engines do not have the time and resources to physically visit each site to verify the quality of its content. The internet is just growing too fast.

For this reason, search engines have turned to pre-existing web directories, such as the Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project. Web directories may only index a small percentage of the websites available on the internet. But their goal is to index the best of the Web, not every site on the planet.

This is why search engines, such as Google, place a great deal of importance on sites listed in the Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project. For each site in their respective directories has at least had a human reviewer visit the site to confirm that it meets the quality required to be listed in the directory and the listing title and description fits the site.

The Different Between Search Engine & Directory

The Different Between SE & Directory

You would be using search engines so you know how they work from the user perspective. From your own experience as a user, you also know that only those results that list at the top of the heap are most likely to attract you. It doesn’t amuse you to know that your search yielded 44316 results. Perhaps even number 50 on your list will not get your custom or even your attention. Thus you know that getting listed on the top or as near to the top is crucial. Since most of the search engine traffic is free, you’ll usually find it worth your time to learn a few tricks to maximize the results from your time and effort. In the next section, you will see how search engine works – from your perspective as a website owner.

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