Five Strategies for Organic SEO
Of all the Internet marketing strategies in use today, organic search engine optimization – or organic SEO – one of the oldest, battle-tested methods of achieving top rankings in the search results. Organic SEO works to build rankings for website based on having highly relevant content that is applicable to the keyword phrases that users are searching for.
To achieve high rankings in the organic search results, there are a variety of both on-site and off-site SEO strategies that work in tandem to help build authority and trust with the search engines on selected keyword phrases.
Below you can read five basic strategies that search engine optimization companies use in order to benefit their clients’ organic SEO strategies.
- Conduct exhaustive keyword research: Keyword research is the process of uncovering the most beneficial key phrases that Internet users are searching for that you’ll want to target for your organic SEO campaign. Before you start your keyword analysis, you must determine who your target audience is and whether you’ll target Internet users on a local, regional, national or global scale. If you’re simply targeting local searchers, you’ll want to uncover keyword phrases that use geo-specific modifiers for your keyword targets (i.e. Rental Cars in Atlanta or Atlanta Rental Cars.) There are many useful tools that allow you to conduct keyword research to find which phrases are being search for by Internet users. One of the best is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, which is a free keyword analysis tool that lists keywords based on their search volumes and how competitive they are.
- Have strong SEO copywriting: Once you’ve uncovered the most beneficial keywords for your organic SEO campaign, you’ll then want to have a professional SEO copywriter develop optimized web content for your website that uses these keywords in a strategic manner that benefits organic SEO. Each web page on your site should be dedicated to on main keyword phrase or topic and that keyword phrase or topic should be used throughout the web content on each page strategically in header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) and throughout the body text. Utilizing strong tags on your keyword phrases also lets the search engines know that this word is more important than the others on your web page. Having well optimized SEO copywriting is a key ingredient in the overall success of your organic SEO strategy.
- Optimize Your Meta Tags: Meta Tags are informational tags that tell the search engines what your web page is all about. There are three main Meta tags that you can optimize for organic SEO benefits. The first tag is the Title tag. The Title tag, which shows up at the very top of each page in on the search engine results page (SERP) should include your targeted keyword phrase toward the front of the title tag. This also holds true for the meta Description tag, which is the second most important meta tag that you can optimize. The meta Description tag is a brief 170-200 character content block that shows up directly underneath the page URL on the SERP. Including your targeted keyword and a variation of that keyword is a best practice for optimizing your web page for organic SEO. The final meta tag I’ll discuss is the meta Keywords tag which has become less and less important for organic SEO. This tag was often abused by SEO companies that stuffed the tag with every keyword under the sun. Now Google doesn’t even use this tag to factor into how well a page ranks for certain keywords. I still use it however, because it’s like dotting the ‘i’ on your meta tags. Don’t over stuff the tag, but include your main keyword phrase and a handful of closely related keyword variations in the tag.
- Utilize search engine friendly URL structures: The URLs of your website should also keep your targeted keywords in mind. Optimized search engine friendly URLs work to support your optimized web copy and meta tags by including the same targeted keyword phrases in the URL string. If your web page has the same targeted keywords in the Meta tags, in the body copy and in the URL, that all combines to make your web page highly relevant to the keyword phrase being targeted for your organic search campaign.
- Start a content marketing strategy: Once your website is well-optimized for organic SEO, the next step you should take is starting a content marketing campaign that helps to build links to your website. Building links to your web pages builds authority for your web page on the particular topic it discusses. The best way to garner these links is by blogging and article writing, as well as distributing other content to other websites such as videos and press releases that help to build your online footprint and to help build links back to your site. This off-site content marketing strategy is a crucial cog in achieving long-term organic SEO success.
