Consider these notes on Natural Search Engine Optimization. This is a work in progress.
"Organic" or "Natural" search engine optimization (SEO) is accomplished by optimizing your web pages and by increasing your "link popularity".
One of the biggest factors to improving your rankings with natural search engine optimization is by boosting your "link popularity" by encouraging links that point to your web site. These links give you lasting results by giving you top rankings and traffic from the search engines. Natural search engine optimization gives you a higher return on your marketing dollar.
The breakthrough idea for marketers is that natural SEO drives significant value. It's the partner of paid search advertising where you get what you pay for. Natural SEO last beyond a campaign and achieves unanticipated search listings and search referrals.
Natural SEO involves making modifications to a website (design, content, page structure, technical structure, relationship with other websites) to make search engines like Google perceive the site to be of such high relevance that it will show up on top of the search results page when certain searches are conducted.
Appearing high in natural search results assures constant visibility across a range of keywords, day after day (and month after month).
It typically takes a few weeks to a few months to make the necessary changes and have the search engines respond with a high ranking. Just how long search optimization takes to produce strong results depends largely on your starting point - is your website even recognized by the search engines? Is it coming up for any of the terms of interest? Does the site have enough useful content to make it truly relevant to searchers, etc.?
Google, as well as others, prefer sites that employ an ethical and natural SEO. In other words, they really want to see a site that produces good, solid content and focuses on that.
Your site needs to offer something more: relevant content, value, keywords, search engine compliant.
Create well ordered semantic pages - properly formed and marked-up page.
Write a telling title element which accurately describes the content. Use concise, appropriate and descriptive words.
Be honest with meta descriptions and something out there will pay attention to it.
Page rank is more or less a measure of in-bound links, by default a measure of site popularity.
Fresh in-bound links seemingly generate an upward movement because they demonstrate that fresh, relevant content is being generated.
Adding a massive list of irrelevant links to your site, or even hiding is not a good practice.
Stay on a fairly rigid schedule with posting fresh, relevant content.
Start with some keyword research to identify which terms are best for your company to be going after. For best results it's a good idea to cast a wide net at this point - the words you use and the words your customers use to refer to your products or services may be different.
Common misspellings or mispronunciations have accounted for up to 10% of a site's traffic. That's potentially 10% new customers because a smart optimizer thought to look where others hadn't.
Access the number of words on a page, the percentage of words on specific pages that fall into certain categories, and the number of, and nature of websites that are linked to you and that you link to.
Identify keywords and phrases people use when they search for the products and services you sell, and then getting you high natural rankings for those keywords.
The best part is that you're not going to pay anything to search engine companies for these visitors. They literally come to you free of charge as long as you maintain your high rankings.
Variables to consider for organic search engine rankings: title page names, url's, meta tags, keyword copy, keyword and description tags, graphics titles and internal/external hyperlinks.
A landing page is the page visitors arrive at after clicking on your promotional creative. Your landing page convinces the visitor to stay and:
Fill out a form (but people hate filling out forms)
Provide personal details (but people hate getting spammed)
Buy something (but people hate being scammed)
Read a lot of information (but people really hate reading)
Think About Your User - They come looking for clues to quickly answer their questions.
“Is this the right place?”
“Is this how I imagined it would be?”
“Should I click the back button?”
“Does this look trustworthy?”
“How much time is this going to take?”
“Should I accept this offer?”
Tips to Improve Your Landing Page:
- Before you start, define that page’s conversion activity.
- Visitors are expecting a very targeted message. Tailor the pages to them. Eliminate unneeded elements. Strip any unneeded distractions from the page. Deliver a very specific message.
- Remove the navigation bar.
- Stay focused - avoid the urge to promote or link to other areas of your site. Prevent your visitor from wandering.
- Place enough content above the fold to allow your visitor to make a decision about continuing on the site.
- Remove all unneeded fields. Don't ask for city/state/province if you ask for a Zip or postal code. Focus on the essentials.
- If you’re asking users to register for a newsletter, ask for only an email address. You don’t need their name now. Get rid of the reset button. It’s dangerous for both the user and you.
Is the whole page focused?
Does the message match the advertisement?
Have you reduced all distractions?
Is critical information above the fold?
Are there enough conversion exits?
Does the page enhance your brand?