Another elements of organic SEO

Internal and external links

Another element of organic SEO that’s just as important as your web site content is the 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.

When links first became a criteria by which crawlers ranked web sites, many black-hat SEO

users rushed to create 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. In other words, if your links don’t go to or lead in from pages that match the keywords that you’re using, they will be of little value to you.

The balance of links that are included on your page is also relevant. Too many links and your

site could be considered a link farm. Too few and you’ll lose out to sites that have more and

better-targeted links.

Your best option when including links on your web site is to link to the pages you are certain

are relevant to your site content. Don’t include a link unless you’re sure it will have value to

your visitors, 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 visitors 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.Finally, don’t forget to include the 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, but it’s nice to include it in the event that they either need it or simply want to click directly to the page they’re seeking.

How you design your site map is a matter of preference. Some organizations create site maps

that include only the top two levels of pages. Others include maps that go three levels down or deeper. Whatever level of depth you think will be required by the majority of users is how deep your site map should go. Keep in mind, however, that site maps can become just as overwhelming as any other navigational structure if your site contains hundreds of pages. In short, design your site map so it’s easy to decipher and takes users to the pages they are seeking without difficulty and confusion.

User experience

User experience is a little harder to quantify than other site-ranking elements. It’s easy to claim that users will find your site simple to use, that they will find the information or products that they’re seeking, or that they will have reason to return to your site. In practice, that’s a little more difficult to achieve.

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 ever. They may not be able to make you a grilled cheese sandwich, but they can certainly keep track of what results users click when they run a search. Those result selections are essential to the organic ranking of your site.

Here’s a scenario. Suppose you search for something like health-insurance information. When the search results appear, how do you choose which results to look at? Most users read the small descriptive lines that are included with the search engine ranking and select according to 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. 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 arrow and you’re taken back to the page of search results. This behavior is called bounce, and the rate at which users bounce off your site is an indicator of the site’s usability in terms of how relevant it is to what users are searching for. This relates directly to the keywords the user searched, 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 make all of these elements work together,

especially when it comes to elements such as descriptions and keywords. Be patient, and be

willing to experiment with different combinations of words or descriptions until you hit on

the ones that send your site rank closer to the top search results. Just remember that this is a process that’s more of an art than a science, and it takes time (usually two to three months) to see the most accurate results.

Site interactivity

When the Internet first came into being, web sites were all about disclosing information. The

only interaction between a web site and a user was the passive reading the user did while on

the site. Today, reading is still important, as users search web sites to learn more about products, services, or topics, but there’s much more to web sites now than just text on a screen. 

We now live in an interactive age, and most of us want and expect to interact with the web sites we visit. That interaction might take the form of a poll, the capability 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, but it won’t happen nearly as fast, and the ranking will likely be lower than that of a site that does offer 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, such as persuading them to make a purchase.

No matter what goal conversion you’re seeking, the way to achieve it is through interactivity; and the more frequently users interact with your site, the more likely it is that they will reach that goal conversion page 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 that user back to your site for a future purchase, to find additional information, or simply to interact with your site again.

All of these are important aspects of your web site’s traffic patterns, and search engines 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 fees that advertisers will pay to have their pages ranked high in the search results or their advertisements shown according to the keywords the user was searching by.

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, but you can improve your chances dramatically

by having a solid SEO plan that outlines both 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, but if you use your SEO plan as a stepping-stone, even for organic SEO, you’ll stay focused and eventually achieve the search engine ranking that you are working toward.

Thanks for Reading

Understanding Organic SEO

ORGANIC SEO

All this talk about planning for SEO is great, but what about organic SEO. You don’t have to put any efforts into that, do you? Don’t go foolin’ yourself. 

1. Organic search engine optimization or SEO is the process of improving the traffic towards your website by making it more prominent in search engine results using specific targeted keywords.

Organic SEO is just as much work as any other type of SEO. It’s just a slightly different method of creating a site optimized for search ranking, without having to implement any new technologies or spend a lot of time submitting your site to different primary and secondary search engines. In fact, the distinction here is a very general one. Only SEO purists consider real SEO as being strictly organic — meaning you use no fee-based services whatever. Most people are happy with just plain SEO, which usually means a combination of organic and fee-based, which is often referred to as SEM, or search engine marketing. It’s best if you think of SEO as just SEO; then you don’t have to worry about distinctions that aren’t really important in optimizing your web site.

The definitions of organic SEO vary a little, depending on whom you talk to. Some SEO experts think it’s all about optimizing the content of your web site to catch the attention of the crawlers and spiders that index sites. Others think it’s the number of quality links you can generate on your site. Organic SEO is actually a combination of those and other elements, such as site tagging, that will naturally place your web site in search engine rankings. How high in those rankings depends on how well you design your site.

Before you assume that organic SEO is just the solution you’ve been looking for, however, take a step back. Organic SEO is not an easy way to land in a search engine. Basically, if you put a web site online and spend a little time getting it ready for the world to see, you will have probably achieved some measure of organic SEO without really trying.

That’s because your site will probably be listed in some search engine somewhere, without too much time and effort on your part. Elements that naturally occur on a web site — such as the title of the site, the URL, included web links, and even some of the content — will probably land you in a search engine (unless those elements are black-hat SEO efforts, in which case the engine could permanently exclude you). The question is where in the results will you land?

Without attention from you, that might be on page 10,000 of the rankings — not high enough

to gain any attention at all. Organic SEO maximizes those naturally occurring elements, building upon each element to create a site that will naturally fall near the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). One of the most attractive features of organic SEO is that the methods used to achieve high SERPs rankings are free — other than the time it takes to implement these ideas.

However, there is a trade-off. Achieving organic SEO can take anywhere from three to six

months. For web site owners impatient to see results from their SEO efforts, this can seem like an eternity; but it’s worth the extra time if the budget is an issues.

Watch this interesting video on organic SEO it will clear your doubts.

ACHIEVING ORGANIC SEO

Not only can achieving organic SEO take time, it also requires targeting the right elements of your web site. You can spend a lot of time tweaking aspects of your site only to find that it still ranks below the third page of search results. If your attention is focused on the right elements, however, you’ll find that organic SEO can be a fairly effective method of achieving a higher search engine ranking.

Make no mistake, however: Organic SEO alone is not as effective as organic SEO combined with some form of pay-per-click or keyword advertising program. 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, and then focus on search engine marketing elements such as keyword advertising. 

CONTENT OF THE WEBSITE

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 in an attempt to artificially improve search engine ranking. Despite these dishonest approaches to search engine optimization, web site content is still an important part of any web site optimization strategy.

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 are the words on the page. Product descriptions, articles, blog entries, and even advertisements are all scanned by spiders and crawlers as they work to index the Web.

One strategy of these crawlers and spiders is to examine just how the content of your page

works with all of the other elements (such as links and meta tags) that are examined. To rank high in a selection of search results, your content must be relevant to those other elements.

Some search engines will delist your page or lower your page rank if the content of your site is not unique. Especially since the advent of blogs, search engines now examine how frequently the page content is updated, and look for content that appears only on your web site. This doesn’t mean you can’t have static content on your page. For e-commerce sites, the product descriptions may rarely change.

Including other elements on the page, however, such as reviews or product updates, will

satisfy a crawler’s requirement that content changes regularly. Content is an important part

of your site and the ranking of your site in search engine results. To achieve organic SEO,

take the time to develop a content plan that not only outlines what should be included on

each page of your site, but also how often that content will be updated, and who will do the

updates.

One other element you might want to consider when looking at your page content as part of

SEO is the keywords that you plan to use. Ideally, your chosen words should appear on the

page several times, but as mentioned previously, this is a balancing act that might take some

time to accomplish.

As part of your site content, keywords require special attention. In fact, selecting the right keywords is a bit of an art form that takes some time to master. For example, if your web site were dedicated to selling products for show cars, you might assume that ‘‘show cars’’ would be a perfect keyword, but selecting the right keywords requires a thorough understanding of your audience and what they might be looking for when they visit your web site. In the case of show cars, people looking for products for show cars might search for ‘‘accessories,’’ ‘‘brand names,’’ or just ‘‘car manufacturer.’’ It could even be something entirely different, such as the name of a product that was featured at the most recent car show.

Learning which keywords will be most effective for your site requires that you study your audience, but it also requires some trial and error. Try using different keywords each quarter to learn which ones work best.

It’s also advised that you use a tracking program such as Google Analytics to monitor your web site traffic and track the keywords that most often lead users to your site.

Thanks For Reading

LONG TAIL SEARCH CONCEPT

LONG TAIL SEARCH??

Long Tail wasn’t coined to deal specifically with search. Anderson was originally trying to explain the difference between the success of e-commerce stores compared to that of brick-and-mortar stores. His theory was that because of space constraints, brick-and-mortar stores have to justify every item that’s put on their shelves. This means the items have to ‘‘earn their keep,’’ so to speak, which in turn means that an item found in a store needs to generate consistently high revenue.

E-commerce stores aren’t beholden to the same rules. Theoretically, an e-commerce store doesn’t have to pay for the actual shelf space to stock a store, which should reduce the cost of carrying items. In many cases, nor do e-commerce stores have to physically stock an item in a warehouse somewhere. They can (and very often do) use a method called drop shipping, whereby products are shipped directly from manufacturer to consumer. The e-commerce site is nothing more than an order-taking system. That reduces the cost of providing a wide selection of items to consumers, which in turn means that e-commerce stores can afford to stock less popular, but still wanted, items.

A commonly quoted example of this concept is a brick-and-mortar bookstore such as Barnes

and Noble versus a pure e-commerce store such as Amazon.com. By most estimates, Barnes and Noble stocks an average of 300,000 books, and not all of those books appear in all stores. What all those books do have in common is that they sell a certain number of copies each month.

They are items that have proven to be in demand, and therefore they earn the half inch or so

that they occupy on the shelf. Amazon.com stocks millions of books — many of them books that don’t sell more than a copy or two each month. Nonetheless, Amazon is still a successful retail business because it costs much less to make those books available to customers. There’s no shelf to pay for and not everything you find on the Amazon.com web site is stored in Amazon warehouses, which means Amazon can offer customers books that are less popular or are popular with only a niche segment of the population.

What really makes this concept interesting from both a retailing and a searching aspect is that studies show that around 20 percent of the revenue generated by a retailer is generated by the most popular items — those items that are most searched for and most in demand. The remaining 80 percent of revenue is generated by the less popular niche items that users are searching for.

WORK OF LONG TAIL

The Long Tail, then, is roughly the reverse of Pareto’s Principle, which would hold that 20 percent of a company’s products generate 80 percent of its sales. (Keep in mind that this is an estimate.The exact ratio of products to sales varies by company. You’ll see estimates of everything from (20/80 to 50/50.) The important point of this Long Tail theory is that a large number of niche products can, and do, generate a huge volume of sales. Companies such as eBay prove it.

eBay is a niche product company. Search for products on eBay and you’ll find all kinds of very obscure and yet in-demand products. The adage, ‘‘One man’s junk is another man’s treasure,’’ applies, just as it applies to Long Tail search theories, too.

The Long Tail can be represented by a graph, where the vertical axis details the number of

a particular product sold, and the horizontal axis illustrates the number of products that sell

something each month.

The theory holds that the top-selling item for any given retailer sells nearly twice what the

next-ranked item sells, and that each item after that progressively decreases. For example, a sample Long Tail graph for any given retail store might look something like the one shown in Figure 2-1. (How this model relates to search terms is indicated in parentheses on the figure.)

The Long Tail of search represents dozens of search terms that each generate a few clicks

each month.Notice the narrow spike at the beginning of the graph (illustrating the number of highly popular items) and the long tail of less popular items from the middle to the end of the graph. For example, consider an electronics store. The items that make up that spike are products such as the Nintendo Wii, the iPod Touch, and other wildly popular products that everyone thinks they must have. (The spike is called the Broad Head, a term that is discussed later)

The Long Tail theory that Anderson posited for e-commerce works for search behavior too, because what is the Internet but a giant conglomeration of both popular and obscure information and products? An illustration of the Long Tail will help you get the full picture.

For example, a computerized version of Herman Melville’s classic Moby Dick was broken down by word, and each word was ranked according to the number of times it was used in the book.

What researchers found was that the word ‘‘the’’ was the most frequently used word, at about 15,000 times.Of course, the word ‘‘the’’ doesn’t tell you anything at all about the content of the book.Conversely, the word ‘‘whale,’’ which would seem to be more indicative of the novel’s subject, was used only 2,000 times. It ranked twenty-first on the list of words included in the book by frequency.

Translating this example to search, you have to think in terms of keywords. Someone searching for the word ‘‘the’’ in the book would find many instances but not necessarily helpful ones in terms of a search for the book’s topic. Switching to the term ‘‘whale’’ would show fewer search results, but better-targeted ones. A user would be able to gather more information from the results returned.

When you’re considering keywords for your web site, therefore, you have to look at all the

words that are indicative of your chosen topic. When you do, you’ll find that only a small

percentage of those words appear frequently, and these are usually very broad terms. hey’ll

generate a lot of clicks, but if you concentrate only on them, you could miss out on a sizable

number of clicks that are more narrowly focused. 

CHARACTERISTICS OF LONG TAIL KEYWORD

Long Tail keywords are not actually keywords. They’re more key phrases that are very 

specific; and all Long Tail search queries have a few things in common:

■ Average 3–5 words in length

■ Usually not competitive phrases

■ Usually directly related to a product or specific bit of information

■ Each phrase generates only a few clicks each month.

How do you know which Long Tail phrases are appropriate for your web site? To know that,

you have to understand a little about how people search.

People rarely search for random information — they are usually looking for something specific.

If you have an idea of what visitors might be searching for, then you know how to target each

of those searches, using both broad terms and narrower Long Tail phrases. Here are some bits of information that people use search engines to find:

■ Product names

■ Product functionality

■ Product appeal

■ Product quality

■ Product usefulness

■ Uses of products

■ Solutions to problems

■ General industry terms

■ Specific industry terms

■ General terms and geographical locations

■ Specific terms and geographical locations

These are pretty general, but if you begin to apply key terms from your web site topic to these bits of information, then you can see the different ways that you might apply both broad terms and Long Tail key phrases to your SEO efforts.

Clearly, Long Tail keywords can be a very important part of your SEO strategy. They can

account for a sizable chunk of the clicks that are generated on your site each day. And that’s to say nothing of the value of clicks that result from Long Tail keywords. There’s more on that a little later.

LONG TAIL AND BROAD HEAD

Going back to applying Long Tail to products rather than search, the items that make up the

Long Tail of less popular products are things such as food, cleaning supplies, and some clothing items. These are the products that you actually must have on a weekly basis to survive. 

For example, consider your own spending. Think of all the purchases that you make in a given month (we’re taking bills out of the equation; it’s too painful to think about those every month and they’re only loosely classified as products, so worthless to us at the moment). Chances are good that you spend a certain amount of money every month on the essentials that it takes to survive and maintain a household. Those are the items that appear in the Long Tail theory that Anderson posited.

You may also spend a certain amount of your income each month on nonessential items. These are things (like the new iPod Touch) that you don’t need but would really like to have. The products that fall into this ‘‘want’’ category are often referred to as being in the Broad Head. Now compare the two. Two things should stand out in this comparison. First, it’s likely that your spending on the essentials is larger than your spending on the one or two want items that you’ve been eyeing. Second, you’ll re-spend on essentials every month.

Is the picture becoming clearer? Translating this to search, it works about the same way.

Searchers are going to search for those big, Broad Head search terms (the ones that are wildly popular) when they’re at the beginning of a buying process. But as they narrow their buying process, they’ll search for narrower terms — Long Tail search terms. These narrower terms are like the essential items that you pick up at Wal-Mart each week. They’re not as popular as the more exciting terms, but people will keep searching for them.Here’s the best part in all of this: Those searchers who are looking for the less common terms are also looking for more-targeted words and are in a more purchasing state of mind — they’ve worked through the buying process and are closer to making a purchase, which also means

they’re closer to reaching whatever goal conversion you’ve set up for them. 

Thanks for reading.

MANIPULATING SEARCH ENGINE TO WORK FOR YOU

MANIPULATING SEARCH ENGINE  TO WORK FOR YOU

All this information about search engines has one purpose — to show the way of their work so that you can put them to work for your website. Throughout this blog, you’ll find various strategies for optimizing your web site so it appears top in the search engine rankings when relevant searches are performed, but this requires that you know how it works.

Search engine optimization is essentially the science of designing your web site to maximize your search engine rankings. This means that all of the elements of your web site are created with the goal of obtaining high search engine rankings. Those elements include the following:

■ Landing and exit pages

■ Page titles

■ Content Of Site

■ Visuals and Graphics

■ Web site structure

In addition to these elements, however, you also have to consider things such as keywords,

links, HTML, and meta-tagging. Even after you have all the elements of your page optimized

for search engine friendliness, there are other things to consider. 

For example, you can have all the right design elements included in your web pages and still have a relatively low search engine ranking. Factors such as advertising campaigns and update frequency also affect your SEO efforts. All of this means that you should understand that the concept of search engine optimization is not based on any single element. Instead, search engine optimization is based on a vast number of elements and strategies. It’s also an ongoing process that doesn’t end once your web site is live.

SEO is a living, breathing concept of maximizing the traffic that your web site generates, and as such it is a constantly moving target. If you’ve ever played a game of Whack-a-Mole, you can appreciate how difficult search engine optimization is to nail. In that game, a little mole pops up out of a hole. Your job is to whack the mole on top of the head before it disappears back down the hole and appears in another.

Search engine optimization operates on much the same concept. Search engines are constantly changing, so the methods and strategies used to achieve high search engine rankings must also change. As soon as that little mole pops up in one hole, it disappears and then reappears in another. It’s a frustrating game, but given enough time and concentration, you can become very good at it.

Manipulating Search Engines

SEO is all about manipulating search engines — to an extent. Beyond that, the manipulation becomes something more sinister and you run the risk of having your web site removed from the search engine rankings completely. It’s true. It happens.

What exactly can and can’t you do? There’s a list, and here is part of it.

YOU CAN:

■ Create a web site that contains meta tags, content, graphics, and keywords that help improve your site ranking.

■ Use keywords liberally on your site, so long as they are used in the correct context of your

site topic and content.

■ Include reciprocal links to your site from others as long as those links are legitimate and relevant.

■ Encourage web site traffic through many venues, including keyword advertising, reciprocal links, and marketing campaigns.

■ Submit your web site to search engines manually, rather than wait for them to pick up your site in the natural course of cataloging web sites.

YOU CAN'T

■ Trick search engines by imbedding hidden keywords in your web site. This is a practice that will very likely get you banned from most search engines.

■ Artificially generate links to your site from unrelated sites for the purpose of increasing your ranking based on link analysis. Most search engines have a built-in mechanism that detects this type of deceptive practice.

■ Artificially generate traffic to your web site so that it appears more popular than it is. Again, there are safeguards in place to prevent this from happening; and if you trip those

safeguards, you could end up on the banned list for many search engines.

■ Force your web site to appear in search engine rankings by submitting the site repeatedly

for inclusion in the rankings. A good general rule of thumb is that you should submit your site once and then wait at least six weeks before submitting it again. Submitting it repeatedly will, again, only lead to something nasty like being banned from the search engine.

■ Expect search engines to automatically rank you at the top of your topic, category, or keyword as soon as the site is picked up. It can take a little time to build the status that you

need to reach a high search engine ranking. Remember, SEO is a process.

These are just basic rules for putting search engines to work for you. As you get started, however, keep these in mind because you’ll see them repeatedly throughout this blog and any other research that you might be doing on search engine optimization.

SEO is hard work

Something to remember as you embark on this journey toward SEO is that it is not going to

be easy. Just when you think you have it figured out, the search ranking algorithm will change.

If you’re lucky, the change will only mildly affect your search rankings. However, if you build

your site to please search engines, it’s more likely that your search rankings will be turned on their head.

That’s one reason why it’s vitally important that you build your web site with users in mind

first, and then search rankings. Ultimately, search engine designers take cues for the changes

they may make from the behavior of searchers. Therefore, if you’re constantly vigilant and

attending to your visitors’ needs, your web site won’t be as affected by changes in the search engine algorithm.

It’s still a lot of work to reach this level of user-friendly design. Some people assume a few

tweaks here and there are all they need, but unless your site is very well designed to start with,tweaking just won’t cut it. It’s more realistic to understand that you’ll end up putting dozens of hours into your separate SEO efforts.

Scheduling SEO efforts

Because SEO is so much work, a good way to manage it is to schedule daily time into your

routine for SEO efforts. Of course, this is after the initial implementation of SEO. Initially, SEO should be done during the build of a new web site, or it can be built into existing sites if they are not new constructions. However, if you’re building better SEO into an existing site that’s poorly optimized, then be prepared for a major site redesign.

SEO is a holistic approach to improving your search engine rankings. As such, it requires attention to your whole site. It does little good to optimize portions of your site and leave other areas lacking the same attention to detail. If you’re going to SEO your site, do it right and make sure you hit all of the elements as you go.

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Classifications of Search Engines

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CHARACTERISTICS OF SEARCH

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