What is Organic Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is a method of placing a web site in the first pages of search engines results for a given search term. For example, if a visitor goes to say, Yahoo! and enters the search term, "Houston medicare supplements," they are presented with a list of results similar to that shown below. At the top, in the blue shaded area, the Sponsored or Pay-Per-Click listings are shown. Under the Sponsored Listings, the Organic Listings appear.

What Is The Difference? If your site is listed in the Sponsored Listings, you will pay anywhere from a few cents up to or even more than $20 every time somebody clicks on the link to your web site. If you are in the Organic Search Results, such as our client in this example, you pay nothing.

How Are The Search Results Determined?

First, you need to understand the difference between a search engine and a directory and how each works.

A directory is the term used to describe a list of web sites compiled by humans. When a web site is submitted, it is assigned to a human editor who visits the site and decides whether or not it is suitable for inclusion. If it is included, the site is listed in the directory with a short descrition. When a search is performed by a visitor, only the short descriptions are searched and the most relevant are presented in order of relevance. Any subsequent changes to the web site content, etc., have no affect on the search results.

A search engine is a fully automated method of indexing millions or billions of web sites. At regular intervals, normally each one or two months, the search engine sends out its "spider" to crawl the web. The spider crawls through the web site and stores its findings ready for the next stage: indexing. Everything the spider finds is placed in a huge index. When a searcher enters the search term, the search engine sifts through millions of records to provide a list of relevant results.

As search engine spiders are sent out at regular intervals and respider web site pages, page changes, additions, and other factors will affect how the web site is ranked for any given search term.

These days, there are also hybrid web sites that provide search results from its directory listings and its search engine listings. These sites have human editors who visit web sites and place them in their directory, and an automated spider. When a searcher enters a search term, results displayed will seemlessly include results from both the directory and the search engine.

How does the search engine determine if a particular web site is most relevant to the terms entered by the searcher? The indexed data captured by the spider is subjected to a set of rules known as an algorithm. The algorithms used by search engines are closely guarded secrets but, from experience, we know there are several key ingredients to improving a web site's score for a given search term:

• Keywords: Keywords should appear in the metatags (unseen portions of the web site in the "HEAD" tag), sprinkled liberally in the page content, appear at the beggining and end of the page, etc. However, one has to be careful! If the keyword appears too frequently, or is used excessively, the search engine may consider the page to be spamming and will penalize or even remove the web site from its' listings - this is known as sandbagging.
  
  
• Off-Site Factors: Google was the first to recognize the importance of peer recommendation. Peer recommendation in search engine terms means that other webmasters have recognized the importance of your web site and have placed a link from their site to yours. These are known as "backlinks."
  
  Backlinks come with varying degrees of influence: the page rank of the referring web site is taken into consideration, how many other outgoing links are on the same page, whether the outgoing link is from an "authorative" web site or not, and whether the link is "reciprocal" or one-way. All of these factors and more determine the importance of the incoming backlink.
  
  
• Other Factors: Some search engines now record how popular a listing appears to its searchers. For example, let's say a web site ranks highly for a given search term but, searchers do not click on the link presented to them. Instead, they choose a lower ranked web site, or move to the next page, etc. After a while, these actions are taken into consideration and the web site that receives little or no interest will be moved down in the search results.

How Does Organic Search Engine Optimization Work?

There are three main factors in Search Engine Optimization:

1. Title
2. Page content
3. Link text

Correct optimization of these three elements will give you the best chance of having your web site appear at the top of the results for your selected search term.

The Title

This is located in the "Header Tag" of the page and can be seen by doing a right click and selecting the menu item "View Page Source." The browser will open a new window and will display something similar to that shown below:

The title tag is the first entry under the "<head>" tag, making it the most important text on your whole page.

Page Content

Keywords should be sprinkled liberally throughout the page and especially at the beggining and end of the page. They should also be entered as the "alt" text for images, appear in H1, H2, and H3 tags, in links, in bold, and in comments. However, like too much salt and pepper in a meal, it is very important not to over do it. Too many keywords and you will be accused of spamming and your web site will disappear into the sandbox. Like a perfectly seasoned meal, you need to sprinkle just the right amount.

Link Text

Link text is one of the most overlooked issues in search engine optimization. Let's say a web site links to you with the standard "Click here." the search engine will read the text and record that your web site is related to the term "Click here." If the link text is lets say, "Best Plastic Surgeon in Houston," it will know that your site is related to, you guessed it, "Plastic surgeon in Houston." Which do you think will give you a higher ranking for "Plasic surgeon houston" (no prizes for guessing correctly!)?

Links are important for many other reasons, including getting the search engine to find your web site, the relevance of the link to your site as described above, and for their importance.

The aggregate of your inbound links is a key factor by which the search engines determine the importance of your site. For example, let's say you are competing with a web site for the same keyword but, your competitor's web site is blessed with a lot of one-way, correctly worded backlinks from high page ranked web sites such as industry directories, directories with high regard such as DMOZ, etc. You competitor's web site will more than likely be placed above yours even if yours is highly optimized.

Do you want to know how your web site measures up? Click on this link for your free search engine optimization report.

Read more about the importance of these three factors in our search engine optimization case studies section.