Achieving organic traffic, what is a site to do?

To open the topic I would like to pose a question. What is it that you have control of within search engines and online? Honestly... not much. You can’t control the searchers, you can’t control the search engines, so what can you control? Mostly your optimization, and that’s what we want to introduce in the succeeding information.

Lets go through the process from start to finish. First the searcher comes up with an idea of they want and they go to a search engine to find it. We can’t control what search engines they use, what phrases they search, or what results they select. Sounding a little pessimistic? It’s actually a lot better situation than it sounds, with online searching we actually have a leg up. Online we can actually track what people are searching and market towards their demands. Using tools like Google’s adwords keyword tool we can research the best possible phrases to market towards within our respective industries.

So now have done the research and we know what people are searching for, meaning we can market towards their demands. That brings us to the next thing outside of our control, how the search engines place us in the results listings. We can control how much marketing we do and our marketing strategy, but with search engine’s hard to understand ever changing algorithms and ways of determining relevancy we can never tell where we are going to rank. However, there are two aspects of control we can exercise to positively influence the flow of organic traffic. First is the display information you provide to the search engines including your page title, description, and URL. And second is your website itself and the keywords used on it. These will be your factors in achieving online marketing success.

Let’s look at your display information first, starting with your page title. Consider your title 55 characters to success. You need to use your title to introduce your website to the world and draw attention to your site. Using your primary keywords in your meta title will help you twofold. First, it will embolden them when they are used in search —drawing more attention. And second, it will help your optimization efforts as your page title is one of the foremost priorities in the eyes of search engines.

Next, your meta description. The description is even more important than your title when it comes down to the eyes of the searchers. Research suggests that 80% of all searchers will look to the meta description before making their choice among the results, that means you need to make the most of it. When generating a description you need to make it appealing to readers by making sure that it is relevant to their search, utilizing a complete thought, and has some kind of call to action or incentive. When writing your description there are character limits as well to prevent your thought from ending prematurely in an ellipsis. Google will display up to 160 characters, Yahoo! 165, and MSN 200; to be safe staying below 160 is your best bet.

And now to the final aspect of your display information, your URL. Your domain name is again important to both the searchers and the search engines. You want to have a domain name that first and foremost relates to your market. You want your URL to be short and to the point, this will help keep things memorable and eventually leads to customer retention and brand building. When possible directly containing your keywords within your URL is beneficial for optimization purposes.

And now moving on to the second item within your control, your site! Within your site there are various optimization techniques all stemming from keyword optimization. Ensuring you are utilizing keywords and phrases that are in demand within relative content on your site is really what search engines want. Proving your site to be relevant will help your display information be shown to the right searchers, and —presuming it is done correctly, your display information will then draw searchers to your site were the rest is in your hands!

So say you develop a site optimized within all recommended guidelines and you’re getting organic traffic, what next? Well optimization never really ends, but you’ve made it to a great starting point and it’s time to transition your focus from SEO to SEM. Utilizing the keywords you’ve found to be successful throughout the process of identifying your market strategy you can now open yourself up to new worlds of article marketing, blogging, social networking, and more!