4 things and their minimum effective dose for DIY organic SEO

Understanding Organic SEO

There are four points to organic seo – keywords, source materials (this is the site that is actually going to be ranking in the search engines and where we want visitors to go), links and manipulating user metrics.

Keywords:

Researching keywords is key to cover all aspects of the broader spectrum of searches people will do looking for what your site offers. This is generally done by looking at a cross section of competitors (at least 5) and tabulating every keyword that is relevant. From this list source materials can be generated. It will take about 30 minutes to do this at a basic level and get you broad keywords and any interesting secondary keywords you can use in your article titles for ongoing content. Anything above 5 main competitors starts to get samey.

Source materials:

By the far the most important aspect of successful organic SEO is having sufficient high quality content to link to. Every possible concept, especially current ones, needs to be explored with content for your product or service. This includes all information or questions a potential customer may have whether a beginner or a veteran shopper.

I have done exacting tests on the importance of ongoing content – especially for new sites. Here are the maximum effect for minimal effort results – 1) new article/posts added weekly, 2) 1-2 static pages updated monthly, social media content streamed in real time with 4-5 various updates per week, 3) Add links monthly from your content to external review content  and other social mentions to help them get crawled sooner.

Links:

The subject of links is best broken down into 3 types when it comes to organic SEO (there is a lot more to links than just organic SEO as high value links on popular and relevant pages can bring in more converting customers than all of your organic rankings combined): High value links, high relevance links and low level links.

High value links are those that give ranking power to your site. These are researched and built. Get 1 a month and link it to your home page – mainly it is worth taking your best article for the month and getting it guest posted on a major industry specific site – you can even get high value sites to link to your guest post and have it feed back through that way.

High relevance links are links to suppliers, authorities and web 2.0 sites specialising in your industry. These can be requested and sometimes bought (although when bought they will usually be less valuable). Get 1 a week and link it to your homepage.

Low level links are generally links that you can easily build from the multitude of social media, forums, article directories, social bookmarking, RSS sites and other smaller or up and coming web 2.0 sites. Link to pages within your content rather than home pages and category pages. The vast majority of the pages with these links on them will not be visited by people more than a few times. These links are generally used to help index your site in to the search engines and to show that there is regular promotion of your content occurring. These links generally lose their ranking power over time and need to be replenished regularly. Unfortunately, because this methodology does some small amount of good, it is required to get to the top of moderately competitive and above industries. Automating the process as much as possible is recommended – many programs take an hour or so to set up and you can just repeat the process monthly from then on with different links within your site and a new broad article on your industry. Do this once a month.

Manipulating User Metrics:

This is a very controversial topic as it involves promoting sites through creating an initial impression to the search engines. We are not talking faking it, we are talking about using who you know to get the ball rolling so you people and businesses that do not know you can subsequently find you.

The principle of presence and profit vs presence and problems – think about this: if you searched on Google for ‘best bank account’ you would probably get 500 different banks listed in 10,000 web pages. Only one of them (or perhaps none of them) will be the best – Google doesn’t try to just give you one answer even to a black and white question as the answer is seldom black or white.

One thing is for sure: the average visitor is going to pick the one on the first page in the top 10 listings or in the top 6 paid advert slots.

Really, the search term ‘best bank account’, probably shows bank accounts for the ten biggest banks on the first page. The order of which depends on the quality and expense laid out for the best organic SEO team and the highest bid on Google adwords (the paid advertising system that gives Google its revenue).

If those bank account pages were not present and visible would they be successful bank accounts? Probably not.

I’ll give you another example that has a negative effect with presence – a client of mine once had a related search for the company name followed by the word “scam”. This is a serious problem – beforehand nobody ever searched to find out if this company was a scam – but after some negative press generated by a rival had got high enough to leave a related search on Google, the searches started happening to find out if the company was indeed a scam. Nothing else had changed, the business was still doing a good job for all of its satisfied customers – the damage was that new customers were being put off.

If the scam link was not present would there have been a negative effect? No.

With that out of the way let me explain user metrics. You basically show the search engine that you have a great site, it is very popular and very well visited for long periods of time with lots of happy visitors interacting with the site, reviewing the site and recommending people visit it. You show that the business deals with all of its interactions rapidly and you do it all under the watchful gaze of the search engine so it cannot be mistaken – you have an amazing site, excellent content and incredibly happy visitors.

What if all of that was done for the single and initial benefit of the search engines so you get to be present to profit? Immoral? Possibly. Not best practices? Depends who is asking.

Does this mean you can have a site with poor content, aesthetics and quality and still get it to the top? Yes. Will it stay there? Not for long.

Does this mean that you can get an exemplary site to the top with excellent content, continued updates and constantly improving and expanding value fast? Yes. Will it stay there? Yes!

It is the combination of 1) keywords, 2) source materials, 3) link building that keep a site at the top and eventually get a site to the top and it is by manipulating user metrics that you can take a site rapidly to the top where it will then be visible enough to maintain its own user metrics naturally.

So how do you go about this?

Get your friends, colleagues, connections, family, suppliers, customers, potential customers and any networking peers to promote you – ask them to do specific things online to increase your size and your appearance. Offer them all incentives for doing so, after all in today’s online world – we need to talk the talk so we can show everyone that we can walk the walk, otherwise they will not be looking – they will be watching Coldplay live on youtube or whatever is the next big buzz.

Social Media, Review Sites, Facebook Likes, Retweets, Recommendation Sites and Rank promotion.

Make yourself look big and popular and people will want to check you out.

What if you “have no tech savvy friends”, “are embarrassed to ask”, or any of the other multitudes of comments people say to me? Find someone who will do it for you – and pay them for it.

Notice you still have to put in a lot of work, provide good content and a great user experience. You are just accelerating and making possible high visibility. It is the ongoing content that makes your site one that Google comes back a recrawls regularly. But it is these user metrics that make Google sit up and come over in the first place.

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3. Keyword and competitor research
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5. Off-site SEO
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12. Online Reputation and PR
13. Ranking Penalties Remediation
14. Online Buzz and Viral Marketing Management
15. Analytics and Conversion Rate Optimisation
16. Ongoing Website Design

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