Five Strategies for Organic SEO

Of all the internet marketing strategies in use today, organic search engine optimization – or organic SEO – is one of the oldest, battle-tested methods for achieving top rankings in search results. Organic SEO works to build rankings for the website based on having highly relevant content that applies to the key phrases that users are searching for.

To achieve high rankings in organic search results, there are a variety of both on-site and off-site SEO strategies that work together to help build prestige and trust with search engines on selected key phrases.

Below you can read five key strategies SEO companies use to benefit their clients' organic SEO strategies.

1. 1. Conduct exhaustive keyword research: Keyword research is the process of uncovering the most beneficial keyword phrases that internet users are searching for that you will want to target for your organic SEO campaign. Before starting your keyword analysis, you need to determine who your target audience is and whether you will be targeting internet users on a local, regional, national or global scale. If you're just targeting local searchers, you'll want to uncover keyword phrases that use geographic designations for your keyword targets (eg Car Rentals in Atlanta or Car Rentals in Atlanta.) There are several useful tools that allow you to conduct keyword research to find out what phrases Internet users are searching for. One of the best is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, which is a free keyword analysis tool that ranks keywords based on their search volume and how competitive they are.

1. 1. You have strong SEO copywriting: Once you've discovered the most beneficial keywords for your organic SEO campaign, you'll then want to hire a professional SEO copywriter to develop optimized online content for your website that uses those keywords in a strategic way that benefits organic SEO. Each web page on your website should be dedicated to one main keyword phrase or topic, and that phrase or topic should be used throughout the web content on each page strategically in the heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc. .etc.) and throughout the text. Using strong keywords tags also lets search engines know that this word is more important than the others on your website. Having well-optimized SEO copy is a key ingredient to the overall success of your organic SEO strategy.

1. 1. Optimize your Meta tags: Meta Tags are informational tags that tell search engines what your website is about. There are three main Meta tags you can optimize for organic SEO benefits. The first tag is the title tag. The title tag, which appears at the top of every page in the search engine results page (SERP), should include your targeted keyword phrase towards the front of the title tag. This also applies to the Description meta tag, which is the second most important meta tag you can optimize. The Meta Description tag is a short 170-200 character block of content that appears directly below the page URL in the SERP. Including your target keyword and a variation of that keyword is a best practice for optimizing your website for organic SEO. The last meta tag I will discuss is the Keywords meta tag, which has become less and less important for organic SEO. This tag was often abused by SEO companies who stuffed the tag with every keyword under the sun. Now Google doesn't even use this tag to factor in how well a page ranks for certain keywords. However, I still use it because it's like dotting the “i” in your meta tags. Don't stuff the tag, but include your main keyword phrase and a handful of closely related keyword variations in the tag.

1. 1. Use search engine friendly URL structures: Your website URLs should also keep your targeted keywords in mind. Optimized search engine friendly URLs work to support your optimized web text and meta tags by including the same targeted key phrases in the URL string. If your website has the same targeted keywords in the meta tags, text and URL, these all combine to make your website highly relevant to the keyword phrase your organic search campaign is targeting.

1. Start a content marketing strategy: After your website is well optimized for organic SEO, the next step you need to take is to start a content marketing campaign that helps build links to your website. Building links to your web pages builds authority for your web page on the specific topic it deals with. The best way to gather these links is by creating blogs and writing articles, as well as distributing other content on other sites, such as videos and press releases, which help build your online footprint and build links to your website. This off-site content marketing strategy is a critical cog in achieving long-term organic SEO success.