Posts from — April 2009

Organic search engine optimization is actually a redundant term. Search engine optimization naturally brings about organic, natural traffic. Beyond that you often hear the question of organic versus paid traffic. Understanding the difference between the two of these will help you in your Internet marketing career, and in deciding what to focus on as you promote your website.

The organic search results are those that are naturally found in search engines listings like Google. They appear there because the search engine found your site good enough to include and relevant enough to related terms that people are searching for.

Paid traffic is just that — traffic you pay for. This is usually in the form of pay per click, which can also be found on search engines like Google. Have you ever done a search and found advertisements down the right hand side of the search results? The chances are probably good that you have — and if you haven’t you can go ahead and check it now. People bid on search terms with the hopes that people will click their ads to get to their website.

There are pros and cons to both methods. Organic methods can take quite a long time to show results. On the flipside, paid traffic can start coming within just a few minutes. Many people pay for traffic at first to see if it is traffic that converts (or, brings in money). When they are sure it will, they use search engine optimization techniques to increase their profits.

Deciding whether you want to go with organic SEO techniques first or not can be a difficult decision. This will depend on if you have the funds for paid traffic or if you’d rather start out more slowly with your marketing. On the other hand, if you have the investment capital to get started, you can easily find out if it is worth going for organic traffic or if the search term you are considering targeting is not going to be worth it.

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Believe it or not, there is a lot of manipulation that goes on behind the scenes when it comes to ranking highly for desired search terms. Despite the trickery, natural search engine optimization is a much better route to take as the results will likely be longer lasting. Before we delve into the great ways to increase your rankings, it’s important to discuss the less than desirable methods that can lead you astray.

The first thing you want to stay away from is much of the automated software. While it certainly is the Internet marketing dream to make money without having to lift a finger, many of the automated techniques are simply spam and clutter and are quickly discovered by the search engines. This includes auto scraped content that doesn’t even make sense much less draw readership to it! You can find yourself dropped out of the search rankings faster than you probably thought possible by using such junk content. Hands-off is not always the best way!

Another thing to stay away from is automated blog commenting. There is the caveat that some people find this useful to quickly find the latest blog posts to comment on. There are some uses that are probably okay (like that one), but for the most part you should steer clear of it. Blog owners can tell when the content is not related and will not allow your comments to begin with. Even though this is a hands-off effort, it is completely wasted.

Now for the methods you SHOULD use! The absolute best way to make use of natural search engine optimization is to create quality content. That way you will become well known within the niche and people will naturally link to you. This is what Google and other search engines want to see!

They want to see consistent readership by way of quality content. Every time another website links to you, it is considered to be a vote for your website. If you consistently have good content that gets linked to, it will be clear that you have a lot of votes and you’ll start to rank highly. This is where the true hands-off earning comes in!

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While there are many tools and services you can pay for to help increase your site’s rank, there are many that are free. Utilizing free search engine optimization methods can be incredibly profitable for your business. This is one case where you don’t have to spend money to make money!

The first free search engine optimization technique that you want to put into use is article marketing. Writing 400-500 word articles and submitting them to top article directories will do great things for your rankings! You’ll not only get the benefits of traffic directly from the directory, you’ll also get a high-quality backlink to your website. Ezine Articles is probably the most widely known and used article directory on the Internet. Others include Articles Base and Article Dashboard.

Yet another free SEO technique is exchanging links with related websites and blogs. You can strike up a good relationship with others in your niche — and the chances are good that there are many out there! Simply do a search for your main keywords to find likely candidates. Contact information is usually readily available on the person’s site. Of course, you may have to go through several before you find a good partner to exchange with. Some sites just get too many requests, and others do not like to exchange links.

One of the favorite free techniques is blog commenting. All you need to do is go to Google’s blog search engine and type in your main keywords to find related blog posts that you can comment on. There are even search engines you can use to find what are called "do follow" blogs — these are known to be more beneficial because they tell the search engine to follow that link and count it.

Blog comments are far shorter than articles (i.e. they take less of your time), and it can be a lot of fun to comment within your community. Be sure not to spam these blogs with your links — it is far better to participate in the blog post and become a part of the conversation rather than simply copy and paste a standard comment that will probably not make it past the moderation stage.

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