Organic SEO: Definition, Techniques and Tips

Usually people talk about SEO and SEM and sometimes they think it’s the same thing. Simply put SEO refers to optimizing your website for ranking on organic searches and SEM refers to getting traffic from PPC, CPC. The big difference between these two methods of getting traffic is this: SEO is more a mid and long term solution with long lasting results while SEM usually provides fast results that stay as long as you pay for the service.

Even if you prefer SEM solutions you should also invest in SEO because in time it could reduce your costs by provide your website with free traffic from organic searches. Another thing that you should know from start is that if you choose organic SEO then you should be aware of white hat techniques and black hat techniques.

Black hat techniques will not get you too far since search engines are better in spotting these things. Anything like hidden text, lots of links in the footer, fake backlinks from websites hosted on the same server or that have the same owner or IP, link farms, css styling that is meant to deceive, all these are black hat techniques.

White hat techniques mainly concentrate on the phrase “provide value to the web”. Usually, if you ask yourself this question you stay on the right track. Still, there are some things that might get you a penalty from search engines although it doesn’t seem that obvious:

-          all of your pages link to the main page of your website with the same keywords

-          many of your pages link to another page of your website with the same keyword

-          reciprocal links

-          too many links to other websites on the same page (might lead to the conclusion of payed links)

Other times you may think that you’re doing SEO when in fact you’re not (common mistakes):

-          all your pages have the same title

-          the keywords from the title are nowhere to be found on the page, anchor text, file names, alt property or subheadings

-          multiple links placed on a page that point to the same page: this might offer good functionality for readers but search engines will count only one link

-   target keywords that you don’t know anything about: competition, monthly searches, related long tail keywords

-   there is no sitemap or analytic software

-   pages have few text content

-   pages don’t have descriptive titles and are not keyword oriented

Here are some organic SEO techniques that any SEO campaign should contain:

-    Website Analysis. This task involves analyzing all the basic things of a website: internal linking architecture, generated code, text vs html, basic SEO rules for pages (titles, description metatags, first paragraphs, anchors, anchor text, file names, image alt property, subheadings, bold and italic text), pages indexed by search engines, titles for the menu pages and so on.

-    Keyword Research. When you think about building fresh content it should always be based on a list of keywords. This list should contain detailed information about the competition, monthly search volume and related long tail keywords.

-    Keyword Relevancy. Every keyword has to be checked for relevancy. For example, if you blog about photography it doesn’t necessary means that the keyword “wedding photography” is relevant to you.

-    Content Development and Planning. Once you have your keyword list you have to know how to use it in content and how to link between articles.

-    Internal Linking. Proper linking guarantees a complete indexing of your website by search engines and you can also push forward some of your content.

-    Competition Analysis. You have to know what your competition is doing, how they are targeting your keywords and why they’re ranking better.

-   Analysis of Google Analytics Reports. Having analytic software is crucial. You have to understand metrics, how to read reports and how to interpret it, how to make decisions based on that.

-   Stay in touch with your market. Using tools like Google Alerts, Google Insight for Search, Google Keyword External Tool, Google Search Based Keywords and Google Trends will help you pick your keywords and stay ahead of your competition by knowing the rising trends.

What would you add?

I would like you to write in comments what do you think about SEO and SEM, what other organic SEO techniques you use or know, what do you think about white hat SEO techniques, what other common mistakes do you know. Share your ideas or ask your questions.

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