Of all the internet marketing strategies in use today, organic search engine optimization – or organic SEO – is one of the oldest, battle-tested methods of achieving top rankings in search results. Organic SEO works to create rankings for websites based on highly relevant content applicable to the keyword phrases users are searching for.
To achieve high rankings in organic search results, there are a variety of on-site and off-site SEO strategies that work together to build authority and trust with search engines for chosen keyword phrases.
Below you can read five basic strategies that search engine optimization companies use to support their clients’ organic SEO strategies.
- Do thorough keyword research: Keyword research is the process of uncovering the most useful key phrases that internet users are searching for that you want to target for your organic SEO campaign. Before you begin your keyword research, you need to determine who your target audience is and whether you’re targeting Internet users at a local, regional, national, or global level. If you’re only targeting local searchers, consider uncovering keyword phrases that use geo-specific modifiers for your keyword targets (e.g., Atlanta Rental Cars or Atlanta Rental Cars). There are many useful tools you can use to do keyword research on what phrases internet users are searching for. One of the best is Google AdWords Keyword Tool, a free keyword analysis tool that ranks keywords based on their search volume and competitiveness.
- Have strong SEO copywriting: Once you’ve identified the most useful keywords for your organic SEO campaign, you should hire a professional SEO copywriter to develop optimized web content for your website that uses those keywords in a strategic way that benefits organic SEO. Each webpage on your site should be dedicated to a main keyword set or topic, and that keyword set or topic should be used strategically throughout the web content on every page in header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) and throughout the body text. Using strong tags for your keyword phrases also lets search engines know that that word is more important than the others on your webpage. A well-optimized SEO copywriting is a key factor in the overall success of your organic SEO strategy.
- Optimize your meta tags: Meta tags are informational tags that tell search engines what your webpage is about. There are three main meta tags that you can optimize for organic SEO benefits. The first tag is the title tag. The title tag, which appears at the top of every search engine results page (SERP) page, should include your targeted keyword phrase at the front of the title tag. This also applies to the meta description tag, which is the second most important meta tag to tweak. The meta description tag is a short 170-200 character block of content that appears just below the page URL in the SERP. Inserting your targeted keyword and a variation of that keyword is a proven way to optimize your website for organic SEO. The last meta tag I will discuss is the meta keywords tag, which has become less and less important for organic SEO. This tag has often been abused by SEO companies who have stuffed the tag with every keyword under the sun. Now Google doesn’t even use this tag to take into account how well a page ranks for certain keywords. However, I still use it because it’s like putting the ‘i’ on your meta tags. Don’t overfill the tag, instead include your main keyword phrase and a handful of closely related keyword variations in the tag.
- Use search engine friendly URL structures: Your website URLs should also take into account your targeted keywords. Optimized search engine friendly URLs support your optimized web text and meta tags by including the same targeted keyword phrases in the URL string. When your webpage contains the same targeted keywords in the meta tags, body, and URL, it all makes your webpage highly relevant to the keyword phrase your organic search campaign is targeting.
- Launch a content marketing strategy: Once your website is well optimized for organic SEO, the next step should be to launch a content marketing campaign that will help build links to your website. Creating links to your web pages builds authority for your web page on the specific topic it covers. The best way to collect these links is through blogging and writing articles as well as distributing other content on other sites like videos and press releases that will help build your online footprint and build links to your site. This offsite content marketing strategy is a crucial gear to achieve long-term organic SEO success.
