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 focuses on promoting websites on the Natural search engine results also known as organic results in contrast with sponsored links (Pay-Per-Click/PPC). Organic SEO, if you really think about is a “purist” approach to website optimization because nothing is a “black box”. As an expert in 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. Inbound links and their relevance is another factor that determines your rankings. 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 expert. 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 consultant’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 specialist 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 expert’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 specialist 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: Moe Tamani

About the Author:

Artaxiad

what does SEO mean? Translated, SEO means Search Engine Optimisation. Everybody who has a site want’s a lot of traffic on it. And the best way to get good targeted traffic is from Search Engines like Google, yahoo or Msn. But For your site to get the great traffic that you’ve always dreamed it must rank well in search engines. And this is where SEO comes up. SEO means optimizing your site in any legitimate way to have high rankings in the most important search engines.

I will try to give you a top 10 list with the most important terms meet in the SEO business.

1. Anchor Text. The anchor text is very important in SEO. It means the specific text for a hyperlink. Try to use as anchor text your most targeted keywords.

2. Ethical SEO. You can think about Ethical SEO as the opposite to Unethical SEO. It is SEO made without using any illegal activities that might get your site banned in the most important search engines.

3. Inbound links are links that point to your site. This are some kind of votes in your sites favor, from the search engines point of view. The more of these the better, obviously for traffic reasons, but also because they help build link popularity.

4. Keyphrase is a group of keywords.

5. Keyword is a word that is very important for your site. You keywords and keyphrases are the search terms that you want to rank high for.

6. Keyword Analysis means to analyze all the keywords that are related to your site and see which of them have more searches on search engines. You should optimize your site for related keywords that have the highest search rates.

7. The Link popularity is one of the most important thighs when it comes to SEO. Link popularity means the amount of links that point to your site. The link popularity while raise your site in the eyes of the search engines depending on the quality and quantity of the links.

8. META tags are special tags included at the top of a HTML page. Their purpose is to provide extra information about the web page. The most influential tags for search engine ranking are the Keywords tag and the Description tag.

9. Natural Links. SEO can come from natural ways too. This means that a webmaster on the net finds your site likes it and decides that it’s quite useful for his visitors and links to it. This kind of links are called natural links and this are one of the most powerful links.

10. PageRank. It’s some kind of ranking system invented by Google. The only real problem with PageRank in SEO is that is given much more attention that it deserves. The PageRank can bee seen with the PageRank meter included in the Google toolbar. You can think of it as a tool that measures the popularity of a wesite but only in the eyes of Google. PageRank is important but there are many other factors that are more important in the SEO process for the ranking of a website.

11. BlackHat SEO - is generally referred to as search engine optimization that abuses and goes against the terms of servic set forth by each inidividual search engine’s policy.

12. Spider Also called a bot (or robot). Spiders are software programs that scan the web. They vary in purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.

13. Spam – In the SEO vernacular, this refers to manipulation techniques that violate search engines Terms of Service and are designed to achieve higher rankings for a web page. Obviously, spam could be grounds for banning. Alan Perkins has published an excellent white paper on Search Engine Spam that is highly recommended. Here are some definitions of spam from the search engines themselves:     * Google     * Yahoo      * MSN

14. Robots.txt – Robots.txt is a file which well behaved spiders read to determine which parts of a website they may visit.

15.  Keyword Stuffing – Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of adding superfluous keywords to a web page. The words are added for the ‘benefit’ of search engines and not human visitors. The words may or may not be visible to human visitors. While not necessarily a violation of search engine Terms of Service, at least when the words are visible to humans, it detracts from the impact of a page (it looks like spam). It is also possible that search engines may discount the importance of large blocks of text that do not conform to grammatical structures (ie. lists of disconnected keywords). There is no valid reason for engaging in this practice.

Flashman asked:


We are working on a SEO campaign to create inbound links to our site. What are the best sites like Digg and Slashdot to use for a technology company website?

Avon