- Category:
- SEO
Overview
Organic results are compiled by search engines and are presented by relevancy to the search term or phrase. This is in contrast to “paid search” where advertisers bid on keywords and are ranked using a different algorithm and in a different area of the search engine search results page.
Benefits of Organic Results
- Free
- More Traffic
- Brand Credibility
Unlike paid search, there is no cost to being indexed or listed by search engines.
People tend to click more on natural search results than on paid search results.
Companies gain the trust of their consumers when they can be found online, especially on page 1.
How to Improve Search Engine Rankings
As of August 2010, 94.75% of search result clicks occur on the first page of search results. Also, there is a 100% increase in traffic (16.96% to 34.35%) when moving from position #2 to #1 and a 143% improvement when going from #11 to #10 (1.11% to 2.71%). Improving your websites on-site and off-site strategies can greatly improve your search engine rankings and website traffic.
On-Site Strategy
The purpose of an on-site strategy is to improve the relevancy and crawl-ability of a web page. The following are best practices for ranking on page one of a results page:
- Make sure the content on the web page can be crawled by search spiders. This means make sure the content is in HTML text format.
- Having unique and high quality content is very important because it promotes sharing of the information by visitors.
- Placement of targeted keywords in the title tags, URLs, H1, and in the anchor text of internal links will give web pages the chance to perform well.
- Search engines can not read the content in images. Place a description in the alt attribute of all images to spoon feed spiders the correct information.
Off-Site Strategy
An off-site strategy consists of earning quality and relevant links from other sites to your website. The best way to earn links is to create quality and relevant content that visitors will want to share. A basic link earning strategy is:
- Find your target audience and their online communities
- Listen to their conversations before engaging them to gain insight
- When feeling comfortable, engage them with relevant content
