Optimizing Web Sites for Organic Traffic

One of the positively great things about internet advertising is the very real possibility of gaining free, highly targeted traffic to your web site. This is done through the forces of the symbiotic relationship between web sites and search engines.

We all know what search engines are and essentially how they work. The key element in this discussion to think about is what do search engine really offer? They offer a link from their results page to web sites. In addition to the link, they display the title of the page they return and a snippet of information (basically 140 characters) that they pull from that page describing to the searcher what that page is about.

Search engines need web sites because without them they would not have any results to return. For some reason, consumers are reluctant to go to search engines that just return paid results. Returning organic results, with the paid results piggy backed on, has become the industry norm and what is expected. It seems to provide legitimacy to all of the returns displayed, paid or not.

Search engines rank sites through a variety of factors called an algorithm. You can think of this as a recipe for a really good dish; a dash of that, a pinch of this and cooked for just the right time gives a great result. Another way to think of it is the way we think about mathematical equations like in algebra; A squared + B squared + C squared = the result, with A being links, B being on page text factors and C being age of the site for example. So our job is to try and give the search engine the ingredients it’s looking for so our site will be judged as exactly what the searcher is looking for. The more relevant the search engine think s your page is to the given query the higher you will rank. The higher you rank, the more people will be exposed to your site.

The single biggest factor all search engines look at are the links that are pointing your site. Essentially every link is a vote for your site. The more votes the better and what’s even better than more votes are relevant votes. So for example if your site sold personal computers and Michael Dell gave you a link from his site that would count for more than 10 votes from some fellow mom and pop computer review sites.

Beyond just linking is what they call “anchor text”, this text is the very words a webmaster will use when they place a link from their site to yours. Those words send a powerful message to the search engine algorithm just what your site, or page, is about.

Another important factor is the title of your web pages. A title for a web page, just like the title of a book, tells the search engines a lot about what that page is about. If you think about it logically if your site was about pizza, your title should tell the world just that.

So, when you’re working on your site you want to think about the experience your users have. If you do this, you will also be creating a site search engines can understand as well. Be clear and concise and use the areas of the site such as the meta description to really explain each and every page.

 

 

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