Organic Search Optimization: Maximum Audience, Zero Cash

Credit: Pixabay Creative Commons license

Organic search optimization is a refined and focused method for driving the maximum amount of audience to a website using the least amount of cash.

It  increases the rankings of important pages on a site to the highest possible positions within search engines and get clicks without paying for them.

Organic search optimization is cheap, but it’s not easy. It’s cheap in the sense that it automatically excludes paid advertising.

If you do the work, it excludes the expense of paying a specialist whether on staff or as a contractor. But if you do the work, the cost is the time and effort that go into getting results.

SEO and Organic Search

Search engine optimization is a broad concept that applies to more than one way of getting audience to a site.

The fact is, search engines send traffic to websites using both search and paid advertising.

“Search engine optimization” usually means organic search. But it also applies to sites that get advertising revenue if that advertising is contextual, such as Google AdSense, or some of the more advanced forms of direct advertising.

AdSense is most effective when landing pages use SEO techniques that emphasize critical keywords. Those keywords tell AdSense what kind of ads to display on the page.

Likewise, an ad serving system such as Google DFP uses ad targeting as well.

Best Methods

A short list of tactics will boost organic search rankings for a site landing page. They can be grouped around several key concepts.

The authority and trustworthiness of the page is based on its age, citations, authorship (a new and growing factor), social media interactions, quality of the writing, quantity of writing and especially the number and ranking of pages that link to it.

The optimization of the page is based on keywords that appear in the title, headline, first few paragraphs of the article, alt tag of any images and file names of the images.

More and more it seems that credibility is important in getting higher rankings on an Internet filled with billions of competing pages, many of which are simply junk.

Tracking Results

The results can be discouraging at times. Imagine spending hours, days or weeks working on organic search results and getting a key page to move up only one or two positions in search engines.

But this is a critical point:

Keep at it for months and years. One day look at the total organic search visits for the first six months of the current year and compare them to the first six months of the previous year.

If enough effort and the right effort go into SEO, don’t be surprised if the numbers look better.

Organic search optimization is a long-term investment of time and effort. It may not pay off anytime soon, but the odds are good it will pay off eventually.