In the old days of the Internet, there were no SEO Consultants, automated systems, or all that high technology stuff. A few years ago, in fact, the term ‘Search Engine Optimization’ did not even exist! Website owners struggled with ways and means to get the much-needed hits to their website (never mind if it was not targeted) to hopefully generate the needed revenues. Those were the days of IBM (or ‘It’s Best done Manually) and Organic SEO.

Organic SEO still refers to the processes and strategies that are undertaken to optimize a website so that it gets good relevance ratings based on the keywords that the site is responsive to. The only difference between Organic SEO and the SEO we now know is that Organic SEO is a manual process vs. the current automated processes of page submission and alteration that characterizes ‘modern’ SEO. Organic SEO, if you really think about is a ‘purist’ approach to website optimization because nothing is a ‘black box’. As a practitioner of Organic SEO, you know optimization; you don’t just blindly trust it.

Organic SEO is based on a clear understanding of fundamental concepts, including:

- Search engines and how they work

Obviously, you cannot practice Organic SEO if you don’t even know how the first two letters of SEO (i.e., Search Engine) works. A search engine is a web site that provides the visitor a list of recommended websites to go to, based on a specific keyword or keywords. The rank of a website is statistically determined by what is termed as ‘key word density’ or the ratio of keywords to the total number of words of content in a website. The gatherer of this statistical data is what is called a ’spider’ or ’spider bot’, which is a program whose function is to count the number of times a keyword appears in a website through a process called ‘crawling’.

- Search Engine Optimization

You can’t have Organic SEO without the SEO part, which stands what Search Engine Optimization. SEO’s main goal is simple: bring as many visitors to your website as possible by exerting influence on the search engine to position your website as close to the top of the list as possible. As a result of having more visitors, it is hoped that your website will generate business for you. This result is every Organic SEO practitioner’s clear measure of success.

- Viral Marketing

This is an important concept to understand if you are serious about becoming a good Organic SEO practitioner. Viral Marketing is a strategy to exponentially increase the number of visitors to your website from a small base that you have developed from your initial Organic SEO strategy. An example of Viral Marketing is to offer visitors to your website an opportunity to generate income from their own website by simply putting in your website’s link on theirs so that when people visit their website, then there is a good chance that they will visit yours. This strategy is certainly a handy component of the arsenal of a practitioner of Organic SEO.

- Optimized Domain Names

One of the simplest concepts to understand, yet also one that is not as easy to implement. Getting a keyword-rich domain name is every Organic SEO practitioner’s dream because it carries so much weight in the relevance scale. If you domain name is exactly what you are selling, you will be able to smoothly sail on without much of a problem in the rankings. The problem, of course, is that there is a very high likelihood that the ‘good’ domain names already belong to someone, and this makes an Organic SEO practitioner’s life more difficult.

- Keyword Research

This is the first step on the list of to-dos for an Organic SEO practitioner because it plays a major role in determining your optimization strategy. Since it takes months for any optimization strategy to take effect, an Organic SEO practitioner’s efforts will be wasted if he makes the mistake of optimizing a website based on keywords that are not as popular as he assumed.

Becoming an Organic SEO practitioner is not an easy task at all because it requires a deep understanding of the fundamentals that those utilizing automated systems take for granted. There is a major advantage, however, of Organic SEO vs. the ‘lazy man’s SEO: A clear understanding of the concepts allows you to analyze SEO situations more accurately and come up with strategies that are more appropriate and responsive to your website’s needs.



By: Seomul Evans

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Everyone wants their websites to be search engine optimized, or SEO-friendly. However, there are some common errors that people make when they’re doing SEO work on their site, and these errors can actually cost them that highly coveted top ten ranking that everyone wants. Here are some things to avoid when doing SEO work on your website.

Remember the ALT tags! Almost every image on your website (not including the background and any images that serve as buttons and the like) needs to have ALT text. This is the text that shows up if the image doesn’t load. More importantly, however, it’s the text that tells search engines what the image is since the programs can’t actually see the picture. A good ALT tag will include two or three of your keywords, and it’s a great place to stick in extra keywords that the viewer will (hopefully, unless your image is missing) never see.

Don’t use the same title tag on every page of your site. While it may be easy to simply write one title for your homepage and then leave it on every page, this is another place where you’re losing out on a place to stick keywords. Vary the title for each page so that search engines will notice the difference, and try to include different keywords for different pages.

Avoid scripts! While Flash and the like are becoming more compatible with search engines, it’s still difficult for more search engines to see inside Flash objects. This means you’re losing places to put meta tags, ALT tags, and more.

Don’t just write for robots. While writing articles with a high keyword density might get your page ranked higher by the search engine, it’s going to send actual human readers away. They don’t want to read anything redundant or clumsy. “Our furniture store in London provides great furniture for London residents looking for furniture designed specifically for London” is going to either annoy readers or make them laugh at the horrible writing. Be sure your SEO phrases and such can be integrated into the text seamlessly so they don’t stand out and don’t over-use them.

Also, actually write your website text yourself (or hire someone to write it). Don’t plagiarize – don’t copy and paste text off of one website and put it on yours without making it clear where the text came from. Too much duplicate text on your page will be flagged by search engines.

Likewise, avoid any bad SEO practices like hidden text or keyword stuffing. Hidden text refers to adding a ton of keywords at the bottom of a website and then making them the same color as the background, effectively hiding them from viewers. Search engines still see them, however. In the past, this was a technique that did actually make search engines rank sites higher, but today’s robots are smart enough to recognize this technique and ignore it. Likewise, keyword stuffing, or making a webpage that’s almost nothing but keywords, raises a number of flags in search engine robots and may actually get your pages ranked lower.

Finally, make certain all of your links describe where they’re going. No one likes to click links that aren’t clearly described by the surrounding text or give a good idea of their target. Plus, links are another factor a search engine uses to determine site relevancy, so not clearly marking them is detrimental in several ways.



By: SEO Sapien

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