Online Marketing Tips - What is Organic SEO?

It’s a new year, let’s learn something! Organic SEO is a strategy of using targeted phrases to direct the search engines toward the content on your website. The techniques for doing this vary, from “on-page” to “off-page” SEO.On-page SEO involves using assorted keyword phrases within the content you publish, such as titles, headers, images, and the page URLs. These phrases should also be placed within the “Metadata”, the information that exists “behind the scenes” of each page and post, but which the search engines use to identify and rank your content.Variations of your targeted phrases will also be used within the text you create, as well; this allows you to take advantage of a search engine feature known as “synonymous search”.Off-page SEO focuses on increasing the authority of your website through the act of getting links from other websites; a completely different strategy.How to get startedAn important step toward beginning an effective SEO strategy is to perform market research and keyword analysis. Finding high-value phrases that identify your website as a source for valuable information within your niche is critical to bringing the search engines, and an audience, to you. Since any number of phrases may be available to help you define your subject and purpose, it’s important to determine which phrases offer the greatest potential for bringing visitors to your website.A note on single-word keywords – Single word KWs are basically useless, as they tend to be vague yet highly competitive, e.g., “coaching” is vague. Do you mean football, basketball, baseball, life, business, health, wellness coach?As you can see, if you are a life coach who targets the single word, you will be competing with every type of coach in the world – not just with those in your niche. The use of 2, 3, and 4-word phrases is a far more effective SEO strategy. Known as “long-tail keywords”, such phrases are much more descriptive and are highly valued by the search engines.There are basically two levels of research and analysis:

• Basic – This keyword research is designed to discover related phrases that are actually being searched, offer the potential for traffic to your website and have manageable competition from other websites.
• Advanced – Advanced keyword analysis is a phrase-by-phrase study, designed to determine which of the phrases discovered present the greatest opportunities for moving up on the search engine results page (SERPs) for each phrase.

Basic research is very much about raw numbers, how many searches, how much traffic you might see, and how much competition there is from other websites.Advanced research and analysis, on the other hand, provides you with valuable information on how easy or difficult it will be to move into the Top Ten in the search results, for each phrase you may choose to target.Benefits of Organic SEOWhile offering no guarantees of placement in the search results, organic SEO is a proven strategy for gaining the attention of the search engines and bringing traffic to your website. It is cost-effective and, once a list of high-value keywords has been developed and the techniques have been learned, is fairly simple to implement. However, it is not an overnight solution. It requires patience and a commitment to consistently implement the strategies and techniques outlined above.Compared to pay-per-click advertising, however, organic SEO has two great benefits: it is less expensive and your placing in the search results will hold greater value with your target audience (since they tend to heavily discount the paid ads seen in the search results).Looking for more new design trends, tips, and ideas? Get in touch with TD Fall today.