Organic vs. Non-organic SEO
When you hire an outside company to provide you with SEO services, you have already committed to organic, white-hat website and search engine optimization. Organic SEO services are natural, non-paid methods used to boost your website in search engine results, and move your website up in terms of search result ranking.
Non-organic methods could refer to paid advertising, or in cases of unethical use, black-hat SEO tricks. While paid advertising is useful, and when used with SEO services can give your website an extra boost in both search engine results and in traffic and conversion rates, non-organic or black-hat SEO should never be attempted or used. Using non-organic, unethical SEO will put your web pages risk of being removed from Google altogether. Black hat SEO attempts to “trick” Google by underhanded, dishonest tactics. An old example of this is “keyword stuffing,” in which a website would use popularly searched keywords over and over, whether relevant or even grammatically correct, in web page content, in order to trick search engines into identifying their site under that keyword. This is a very old black-hat trick, and has no affect on search engines anymore, but other black hat tactics are still being tried by unethical webmasters. Even though you have chosen to use only organic SEO methods, stay vigilant of suspicious sites that may want to link to your site. If they use black hat tricks, it could potentially harm your search engine results ranking. This is another reason why its smart to use outside SEO services. True professional SEO services can easily identify such tricks, and the kinds of websites who use them.
Organic SEO is a process. By understanding and being aware of the steps and processes involved with SEO, you can develop a more thorough understanding of how to attract the right target market, audience or visitors, and adjust your entire marketing plan to reflect this knowledge. Additionally, by understanding SEO services, you will have more control over your business website conversion rates, and have better understanding about how to optimize or increase them, based upon different SEO components. Conversion rate optimization and search engine optimization are related in several ways, which will be explained a bit later.
What Not to Expect From Organic SEO Services
Many webmasters and business website owners who don’t know much about how SEO works, believe that when they hire an SEO service, it will be like hiring a contractor to build a garage. Within a couple weeks to a month, the garage will be erected and complete, and ready to park cars in, store tools in, or use any other way you want. SEO service does not work like this. It is an on-going process; not a start-to-finish service, ending with the desired results in a few weeks. Depending upon the website, it can take 6 months or longer to optimize a website within Google SERP rankings (search engine result pages). Even then, SEO services must continue in order to maintain those results. Competition is not going to just suddenly stop and allow your site to stay in a good ranking. It takes continual efforts to keep a website’s ranking high.
Furthermore, there can be no guarantee that any business website will be on the first page of Google within a given time slot. There are SEO services out there who insist they’ll have your website on the first page of Google within 3 weeks to 2 months. Be wary of such services, because they’re either not being totally honest, or they are using dishonest practices. Our SEO services, nor any other’s, can promise you a first page ranking within a quoted time frame. In order to do that, we would have to know exactly what to expect from all current and future competing sites, which is obviously not possible.
So, to summarize what not to expect from organic SEO:
a. Immediate results
b. Finite services that will come to an end within a short time
c. Entirely predictable results
d. Guaranteed ranking on the first page of Google search results in a short time.
What to Expect From Organic SEO
When hiring outside SEO services, there are several things that you should expect to be done, either on a regular basis, or over time. Professionals should include these things in their initial quote, and it’s a very good idea to ensure these things are listed or documented as having been performed. It’s perfectly acceptable, and even recommended, to ask your SEO provider questions about the kinds of measures taken. For example, you can ask how in-depth each service will be performed, to what extent they will be implemented, how often each strategy will be used, and any other questions you may want answered to confirm an SEO provider’s strategies.
1. Keyword Research
This is extremely important and can’t be emphasized enough. Without keyword research, it’s impossible to implement basic SEO aspects, such as keyword content, meta-tags, meta-description and so forth. If a website simply uses whatever keywords they want, without consideration to competition or the volume of users who search for that term or phrase, SEO will be much less effective. This should be done within the first several steps of implementing SEO services.
2. Content
Content is invaluable to SEO, and is the cornerstone on which search engine results are based. This is even more so the case now, because Google changed its algorithm with the Panda Updates, placing even more emphasis and value upon content in search results. Sometimes SEO services provide web content, or the website owner provides their own content, or a third party, usually a content manager or content writer provides the content. If hiring a content writer, be sure the content writer or manager is very familiar with and understands SEO and how to write SEO content. If you are confident in his or her abilities, you can leave the topics to them. However, if you aren’t sure, have the SEO provider assign topics and page titles for the content manager to write about. Regardless of who authors the content, it should be updated consistently, always original, worthwhile information. Weak, shallow and repetitive content is now being indexed and evaluated by Google, for determining the ranking in SERP. Furthermore, high quality content is important to other aspects of SEO, and for off-site SEO as well.
3. Backlink Strategy and Growth
Backlink strategy refers to creating and building a plan for a system of backlinks to your website. To get a visual idea of how backlink building works, think of it as your circulatory system, which centers at the heart. The heart, which represents your website, is linked to by several main arteries. Connected to the arteries are hundreds of smaller capillaries. They can’t all lead directly to the heart, because there isn’t enough room, for one, and the body needs blood pumped to other parts than just the center. This is similar to how a backlink strategy system works. By building backlinks to your website, you increase your ranking in SERP and website visibility.
There are two ways to build backlinks to your site: with anchor links and indirect links. The anchor links are like the main arteries and veins directly connected to the website, and the indirect links are like the hundreds of smaller capillaries, which are connected to the anchor links. This is necessary because when a website is new, has low visibility and low traffic, it cannot handle hundreds and hundreds of backlinks directly to the site without alerting Google that something black-hat-like is going on, and it can actually damage your ranking if too many direct backlinks are built too soon.
Examples of where to build anchor links to backlink directly to a website are:
a. Free blogs on a separate host, such as WordPress.
b. Article sites, like Squidoo
c. Article directories like Ezinearticles.com or GoArticles.com
Indirect links are also important because they lead from and to heavily trafficked sites, like Digg to Squidoo. These indirect links get your site indexed quickly in search engines, but more importantly, generate a lot of SEO power that trickles back to your website.
Examples of indirect links to link to your anchor links include:
a. social bookmarking sites like Digg, or Delicious
b. RSS feeds
This is important to know so that when you hire SEO services, you can monitor how many direct anchor links are built and lead to your website, and how many indirect links are.
4. Website Analytics
Website analytics are typically performed with Google analytics. An account is set up and many different vital pieces of information can be tested, watched and analyzed to help your website perform better. For example, analytics allow you to check where the most visitors are coming from, how many visitors visit your site within a selected time frame. You can view things like how long visitors are staying on your site, which page is most trafficked, which is least trafficked, and which pages are not doing well. This is also the place to monitor keyword and keyword phrases used to find your site, and how frequently those keyword phrases are searched for, and their competition level. Website analytics are extremely important, especially on younger sites, for monitoring and gauging the success of keywords, web page content and placement, and a plethora of other things that can directly affect not only SEO and traffic flow, but conversion rates as well.
This goes back to earlier, when it was established that conversion rate optimization is related to SEO. By studying SEO and what types of keywords, content and web pages are most effective for attracting traffic, those pages can be optimized to receive incoming traffic, either as landing pages, or some other main page, thereby increasing conversion rates. Content revision can even increase conversion rates. For example, a translation website based in Oregon revised its “About Us” page, and conversion rates immediately went up 13%. It was revised because after looking at Google analytics, it was discovered that it had the highest bounce rates and least amount of time on site by site visitors. You can see how this information can be a great advantage to improving SEO and web page content.
5. On and On and On
As mentioned before, SEO services do “end.” If an SEO provider tells you something different, like “we’ll have this done within 7 or 8 months,” – that SEO provider is probably not the best pick. Website and SERP competition is never-ending, and therefore SEO also must be never-ending. If anything, as time goes on, SEO may need to be stepped up, as more and more websites are added to the rankings of search engine results.
Organic SEO = Long Term Results
The reason organic SEO is essential is because it produces long-term results, rather than temporary results that paid advertising achieves. SEO results and the ranking it achieves are long-lasting. While paid advertising and PPC campaigns are useful and effective, they only place your website visibility on front page ads for as long as it is paid for. SEO services are free, and while the results can not be guaranteed to be locked in their SERP ranking, they are much more stable than paid advertising.
As a business or service website owner, look for professional organic SEO services that can prove their experience, knowledge and results with websites they have optimized and clients they have serviced. When a SEO/SEM company promises rates far beneath the competition, or promises immediate, definitive first page ranking, it’s probably a good idea to find another SEO service. Whatever SEO firm you decide upon should have the above steps listed on their stated deliverables, and should be able show documentation for most of the m.
Our SEO services have an excellent track record for website optimization, successful SERP ranking, and ultimately, increased traffic and/or sales for our clients. Contact us today, and be on your way to achieving maximum visibility for your website, increased sales, and higher revenue for your business.
August 22, 2011
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