The most important points to remember when adding links to your pages are simple. You want your links to be from or lead to places/sites/things that are relevant (and for pete’s sake, make sure the links work. I don’t know, maybe you could click it yourself and see what happens. Just a thought). Generally, web crawlers favor sites that have lots of internal, incoming, and outgoing links. Of course, there are those little foxes out there who decided to take advantage of this by creating link farms as a means of unjustly improving their search engine ranking. Well guess what, you don’t want to try that for two reasons 1. You have ethical principles (nudge, nudge) 2. Them web crawlers is smart cookies and they’ll catch yer butt (and when they do, your website won’t be showing up on search engine results at all…blacklisted, oh my!) In short, make sure your links are going to take readers/consumers to something that won’t be met with a “What the heck is this?”

Internal links are a different beast in that they take the reader from page to page within your website and not to other websites. The overarching goal here is to make your internal links user friendly. They should “make sense” and be natural in progression. If that doesn’t “make sense” I suggest seeking a second opinion when creating your internal links.

The final element of organic SEO that we’ll be concerning ourselves with is site interactivity. Believe it or not, web crawlers look for this sort of thing. Yup. You want your site to have something that allows the reader to interact with it, such as: an opinion poll, a spot for comments, a game, files to download… Most sites have a goal and that goal more likely than not involves gathering information on the reader in some shape or form. Whether that be their credit card number or their home address (for informative brochure mailing purposes), site interactivity is an effective way to ensure you get it or at least get your foot in the door.

Now for a quick lil review then I’ll let you be on your way. When building or modifying your website to attain optimal search engine ranking remember: creative and relevant keywords in logical places, superb content, and helpful links. Off you go.

“Organic” is a buzz word these days that’s being tossed around like a piping hot chemically UN-modified potato, but what does it mean within in the context of SEO?

You can think of organic SEO as consisting of all SEO techniques that don’t cost money (kind of ironic when you consider that anything else organic costs you an arm and a leg). The most significant element of organic SEO (and non-organic SEO, for that matter) is content. If you are attempting to optimize your websites searchability using the least amount of money possible, dedicating yourself to the cause of content should be your first priority.

If you already have a lot of content on your site, start with fine tuning rather than adding. Make sure product descriptions are clear, blog entries are intriguing, advertisements are effective, and that articles include a variety of pivotal keywords. [NOTE: Remember to be creative with your keywords. Not everyone’s mind works the same so you have to think of your site from as many angles as possible. Who would be interested in your website? What would they type into a search engine? If I was wanting to research jellyfish I might search “saltwater creatures” but I could just as easily have thought to search “marine biology” or simply “jellyfish information” Brainstorm!] If you don’t have all of these forms of content on your site, get to it! Content is key not only for the sake of conveying information to your audience, but to web crawlers and spiders.

Web crawlers are rather sophisticated mechanisms. They are given detailed, specific, goal-oriented marching orders by those who control the search engines. They don’t seek keywords alone, they also assess relevance between articles and links, advertisements and content,… Therefore, it is vital that your site possess a common thread. Keep this in mind as you edit your sites content.

Other factors to keep in mind when manipulating your sites content are frequency and uniqueness. Web crawlers tend to favor sites that are updated frequently and that provide content not found on other sites. Website updates can come in the form of reviews or comments, not necessarily from posting brand new articles or blogs on a daily basis. So don’t wear yourself (and your audience) out by adding new information constantly.

Organic SEO may not require money, but it certainly requires time. At our next rendezvous we will explore yet more ways to organically modify our websites in order to reach maximum SEO potential. Yeah, it takes a lot of elbow grease, but, remember, it’s ORGANIC!!! (that means like virtually no calories, right? Actually, I think elbow grease is calorie free to begin with. hmmmm.)

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Our goal is to specifically customize our websites and their individual pages in such a way that we optimize our search engine ranking potential for as many relevant keyword searches we can dream up. First, we will assess each page as an independent entity, beginning with the most important ones (home page, most likely). As we look at each page we are assessing the following elements:

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Come on, look alive! Now is the time. We’re gonna get down to the nitty gritty. Plan of action…go!!!!!!!!

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Yeah, that’s right, we’re gettin’ kinda fancy now!! (hardly, I know, I know)
The words you see above are criteria for effective search engine optimization. Our goal is to understand what they are, how they work, and how to implement them in our websites. So, see what you can learn and I’ll see what I can learn and we’ll reconvene here tomorrow, same SEO channel, same SEO time.

R-S-S…What It Means
First things first, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Ok, what does syndication mean again? Don’t bother skipping over to dictionary.com, I already got you covered. In this particular context syndication refers to the immense variety of media available to you on the web including blogs, news articles, podcasts, weather reports, entertainment stories and all other media that is updated on a regular basis. So, RSS is a really simple way to stay up to date with these forms of internet publications (syndicates).

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WHAT TO LOOK FOR

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The trip to the top is not a tried and true paved path starting at A and ending at B. Instead, the journey is more like a hike through a jagged mountain on an ambiguous path, but the bright side is that there are mile-markers and watering holes along the way. The watering holes are easy to find, just look forward, you’re already there!

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