Thursday, September 16, 2010

Basics of organic SEO

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the marketing technique used to drive traffic to websites. The art of SEO relies mostly on keywords; what kinds, where to place them and how they are used. While you can simply use keyword frequency and repeat phrases or search words throughout your content to attract visitors, good SEO goes far beyond such simplistic methods. Organic SEO leads to a natural selection of your site by search engines, without having to pay for placement.

Relevance
Search engines use complex algorithms to rank web pages by relevance. Sites listed by a search engine such as Google are chosen based on their merits, with more relevant sites ranked higher than less relevant ones. You can increase the relevance of your content using organic SEO to give your webpage a higher search ranking result.

Keywords
Keywords are the foundation on which organic SEO is built. Using the right keywords is the basic tenet of SEO. Relevant and competitive keywords are more likely to bring you more traffic. By using the proper keyword frequency, high keyword density and placing keywords in prominent areas such as the title, metatag and the start of sentences, you can increase traffic to your site.

Content
Organic SEO relies on good content to work effectively. Some sites simply list keywords to gain page ranking, but good content offers readers quality, well written articles with keywords used naturally within the work. Organic SEO is often so subtle that website visitors do not notice repeating keywords.

Optimization
Smaller SEO tricks include optimizing your page for keywords such as using keyword within picture titles, having good page navigation tools such as a sitemap or a search function, and using bold text blocks. Having a sitemap helps crawlers and search engines index your pages faster, leading to a better page rank.

Backlinks
Backlinks from other sites are considered good organic SEO because it adds to your site’s search page rank. The more backlinks your site obtains from other relevant and related websites, the higher your page will rank on search engine results. However, be wary of too many backlinks - search engines only rank websites with links to other sources that contain relevant content.

Grouping pages by theme
If you group the pages on your site by related themes, you will increase your relevancy to search engines. By grouping related pages together in larger collections, bots and spiders can index your site faster and this can lead to a higher page rank on search engine results.

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