Major Components for Organic Search Optimisation
Meta Keywords and Tags
Search Engines can better categorise and rank a website if it uses Meta Keywords and Meta Tags.
What Are META Tags
META Tags are HTML tags which provide information that describes the content of the WebPages a user will be viewing. Search engines have recognised that website administrators can use this resource to control their positioning and descriptions in search engine results. Many search engines have now incorporated reading META tags as part of their indexing formulas.
The Description Tag is a general description of what is contained in your webpage. Search engines that support META tags will often display the Description META tag along with your title in their results.
Search engines will often capture the entire META tag of your description field, but you should bear in mind that when a search engine displays the results to a user, the space is limited, usually under 20 words which you can use to grab the attention of a user. For this reason, when creating your META tags, you should make the first sentence of the description field capture the attention of the user and use the rest of the description tag to elaborate further. |
The Keywords Tag is a series of keywords that represents the content of your site. Search engines that support META tags will often use the keywords found on your pages as a means to categorise your website based on the search engines indexing algorithms. Ensure you choose keywords that are relevant to your site and avoid excessive repetition as many search engines will penalise your rankings for attempting to abuse their system. Similar to the Description META Tag, search engines give priority to the first few words in your description, so focus on your main keywords and then elaborate further by using synonyms or other related words.
Keyword Relevance
One of the first steps in organic optimisation is determining which key phrases are to be targeted. This is determined by researching which words or phrases a target audience is most likely to search for. These target keywords are then incorporated into the title, description (META KEYWORD AND META DESCRIPTOR) and the content of a web site.
It is important to note that the overuse of keywords in a web site can result in a search engine's indexing software to considering a site as abusing or spamming the search engine and can result in that site being removed from the search index.
Generally a key word should appear five to eight times within a site's editorial content and content should consist of between 200 and 400 words per page.
An example of ways to find relevant keywords is to use free tools on the internet such as Overture's Keyword Selector Tool: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion
Site Structure
Search engines are somewhat limited in the way they can index a web site. Search engine robots or spiders are chiefly concerned with determining two things, what is this web site all about and where should this site show up in the search engine results. Often the way in which a web site is constructed can have negative results in how effective these search spiders are.
It is important to understand how search engine indexing works in order to create web sites which are fine tuned for optimal search results
Search spiders look primarily for text content when judging how a site is to be indexed.
Sites which are built entirely of graphic elements or flash are not search friendly. Sites which feature an overuse of JavaScript and other dynamic content are not search friendly.
A multitude of factors are considered when optimising for the search engines. Since different search engines follow different rules, and the rules often change, it is unlikely that every aspect of a web site will be perfectly matched to every search engine. The important thing to strive for is eliminating the elements of a site that are known to cause problems, and emphasizing as many search friendly aspects as possible.
Link Popularity/Relationship
What is Link Popularity? Link popularity is a factor that many search engines use when ranking web pages within their indexes. Simply put, most search engines give a ranking boost to sites that have incoming links from quality, related sites. This method of establishing importance, pioneered by the increasingly popular Google, is now used in some form by 19 of the top 20 search engines. While it is still possible to achieve high rankings for non-competitive terms without a great deal of link popularity, it is unlikely your site will rank well for very popular terms without it.
The amount of inbound links to a web site has a direct effect on the search engine page ranking of the site. This makes inbound links an important area of organic optimisation. The quality of the inbound links can matter more than the quantity. Search engines place more importance on relevant links from sites which they consider to be authorities on any given key phrase. Search engines strive to provide the most relevant results possible by filtering out meaningless or “junk” links to a website. In some cases, large numbers of irrelevant inbound links are seen by the search engines as abuse or spamming. Practices such as “link farming” and “free-for-all” link pages are frowned upon.
Exchanging Links is Not Always the Best Way
One of the most prevalent ways to develop link popularity is by exchanging links. But it is not necessarily the best way. First, exchanging links willy-nilly with anyone you can find willing to do so is not a good tactic. It doesn't help your site visitors if you link to irrelevant, poor quality sites. It makes your site look trashy. And it doesn't help your search engine ranking either. In fact, if you're exchanging links too carelessly you could be pegged as a link farm and actually banned from search engines.
The right way to exchange links is by finding quality, relevant sites with which to exchange links. These are the links that search engines care about.
Link Popularity and Great Content
Search engines include link popularity as part of their ranking algorithm based on the theory that if you have great content, offer a valuable service, or sell a product people want, then people will naturally link to you. So what's wrong with doing just that? The first step to building better link popularity the natural way is to improve your website. Spend the time you would have spend searching for link exchange partners on creating sticky content for your site instead.
Press Releases
If your website does anything even mildly noteworthy, write a press release and distribute it on the web. There are several paid and free press release distribution services that will post your press release with a link back to your site.
Affiliate Programs
Start an affiliate program. Offer to pay per click through or per sale that originates at your affiliate's sites. They'll link to you as affiliates and you'll have more inbound links.
Offer Free Articles or Free Tools
Write articles in your area of expertise or create free web-based tools. Offer the articles or tools free to anyone, and ask only for a link back as payment.
Directory Links
Directories are crucial for building link popularity and targeted traffic. Directories are broken down into specific categorical topics followed by subtopics. A quality link from a major directory carries more relevance and weight than scores of links from websites that aren't relevant to your website, product or service.
It is important to note that the sheer number of incoming links is not as important as the quality of the sites that are doing the linking. The fastest way to get some quality incoming links is to get listings in the popular directories, such as Yahoo and the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org). The Open Directory is free for all sites that meet certain quality standards, but it sometimes takes some respectful but diligent follow-up inquiries to make sure your site gets listed. When listing your sites, try to get them in the highest-level category that is applicable to your site.
Finding Partners
Once you have submitted your directory listings, you should look for other sites that might link to yours. Ideally, the businesses that run these sites will be related to yours but will not be direct competitors. Google is an excellent engine to use when looking for potential linking partners. Typing in keywords that you think your customers might use to find you, look for quality, well-ranked, non-competing sites that have "links" or "resources" pages, and objectively look to see if your site would fit with the other sites listed. When you have found a good number of sites, add a link to each of them from a "links" page on your own site. It is important to do this before contacting the site owners, as they are much more likely to reciprocate if they see that you have already taken the trouble to link to them.
The List Of Don'ts
Don't exchange links with sites that you would not want your visitors to see. This type of link can make your site look indiscriminate while defeating the entire purpose of link popularity. Also, do not ever exchange links with sites that contain nothing but a huge collection of links (AKA "link farms"). Search engines have been known to aggressively penalize sites that are associated with such sites. Link building takes a great deal of time and labour, and there is no real shortcut- a primary reason why search engines place importance on it. |
