Organic Search Engine Optimization: Part 3

This is a guest post by Bart Schelfhout of Boza Solutions, a web and software development company with offices in Belgium and London.

So far in Part 1 and Part 2, we’ve looked at what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) actually is, we’ve examined the differences between organic and paid search results, we’ve looked at optimizing your website’s pages, indexing/sitemaps, keywords, meta descriptions and inbound links.  If you haven’t already, make sure you read Part 1 and Part 2 before reading this post.

As mentioned before, the algorithm used by Google is constantly changing and includes many unknown factors (most recently the load speed of a page is starting to affect ranking as well, encouraging developers to reduce the load time as much as possible). I will now list some unconventional techniques for trying to increase your site’s Google Search Engine Result page ranking or visitor number.

Where previously it used to take a huge amount of keywords in the header (some being completely irrelevant to the actually content of the site) to get loads of traffic to your site, things have become more complex. As search engines have evolved since the start of the internet, they have also become more intelligent, making it almost impossible to get irrelevant traffic to your website. At present unauthorised techniques, or Black Hat SEO, can even get your site penalised, making it totally disappear from any Search Engine Results Page (In the SEO world referred to as SERP).

A few examples of black Hat SEO techniques are spamdexing, link farming or keyword stuffing.

Spamdexing is a technique where you create pages especially for search engines, in an attempt to get a higher ranking for a particular key word phrase. It is a reverse engineering trick  where the webmaster thinks of key words and phrases a user might input into a search engine and try to build his page to include as many of those keyword phrases in the content as possible.

Keyword stuffing is similar to spamdexing, where a webmaster puts as many related keywords as possible onto a page, but where he doesn’t care how the page looks like and the main objective is to either redirect to an affiliate or to click on a sponsored ad.

Link farming is a group of websites where every website in the group links to every other website in that group, thus spamming the index of a search engine. However, when the linking is done from sites that are relevant to each other it is not considered a black hat technique.

Another definite don’t do is hiding texts or having titles shown in the same colour as the background (because title tags are more likely to get picked up by search engines as keywords).

Improving your Organic Search Engine ranking is something that takes more time compared to the paid Search Engine inclusion and is something that is influenced by not just one factor (highest bid per keyword click) but by a whole group of factors combined into the search engine algorithm. Do not expect your changes to have an overnight effect! Not all of the factors of the search engine algorithm are known and the importance of each factor varies.

The key to getting as high as possible for search terms RELATIVE to your site’s content is CONSTANT revision and monitoring using monitoring tools such as Google Analytics. Once you reach a high ranking, don’t believe you can sit on your laurels. Organic Search Engine Optimization is an ONGOING process!