Search Engine Optimization Without Spending A Dime

Search engine optimization is a complex business and not for everyone.

Each search engine has its own way of ranking sites. Each search engine has certain key things that it looks for. Therefore, optimizing for all search engines is just not possible. Focus on the top 3 and you will have yourself covered for about 75% - 80% of all searches.

What we are going to discuss here are some of the concepts and methods to help you rank your site(s) higher through the organic search results.

Organic vs. Paid Search

What are natural or organic search results? First, you have to understand that search engines are not in the search results business. They are in the advertising business. If you understand this, understanding organic vs. paid search is much easier.

Think of the results page of almost any search engine. The top of the results page and down at least one of the sides are reserved for the paid search results. Each of the links shown in these areas must bid on their place on the results page. The higher the ranking in these areas, the more the owner of the site had to bid. If you click on one of these links, the site owner's account got hit for the amount they bid.

Therefore, the quickest way for a new site to rank on the search engines is to pay for the ranking. Depending on the keyword you want to rank for this can cost as little as $.05 and go way up from there.

Organic results are those down the middle of the page. Usually, you see 10 results per page. It has been widely discussed and proven that if you are not in the top 30 (3 pages) results that your site will probably not be seen.

Keywords and Keyword Phrases

They may sound alike but they can be a huge key to your SEO success.

Keywords are just that. Individual words or maybe a pair of words that you might want to optimize your site for. For example, on our Gift Basket site you might think that we want to rank well for "gift baskets". While this may be true, the competition for this specific keyword is immense. The top-ranked sites have been entrenched for several years. A new site has little chance of ranking well against these.

Keyword Phrases might be a better choice for ranking against the entrenched players. Studies have shown that the average user of search engines have evolved over time to use more words in their searches in an attempt to narrow the huge amount of search results. If you think about it, having over 2,000,000 results sounds good until you try to work your way through them to find exactly what you are looking for.

Using searches of 3 - 5 keywords in a phrase is the search user's way of narrowing the search before they click "Go". Understanding this, you can then optimize your site for keyword phrases instead of simple keywords.

In our case, instead of optimizing for "gift baskets" and fighting the big boys we optimized for the keyword phrase "gift baskets under $40" and we not only rank high (# 1 at this writing), we get a better qualified visitor to our site who is truly looking for something we have to sell.

On Site Optimization

Get as much education as possible to learn what Meta Tags are. Title, keyword and description tags are the most important. Depending on the type of software used to create your site, you may need to learn some html programming to make changes to these tags.

Simply put, on Google, the results shown are:

• Title tag is the 1st line of a search engine result
• The site description is the verbiage that follows on lines 2 - 3
• The page URL is the bottom of the result listing

Other important factors for on-site optimization are:

• Heading tags in the body of the page. These would be h1, h2, h3, h4 and h5 tags.
• The use of strong tag for bringing emphasis to key words
• Keyword saturation. Using the keywords a number of times per page, but not overloading.
• Beginning the page and ending the page with the keywords for that page.
• Alt tags in images. That is giving a name to every image on the page that has the keywords in the name.
• Links to other sites. This is one that caught me off-guard. Google raises your status with links to other relative sites. Not linking to sites sometimes called "link farms". Rather links to your competitors, for instance, would be considered a good thing by Google.

Landing Pages

Quite simply, a landing page is specifically designed to highlight a keyword or keyword phrase for which you would like to draw traffic.

On this page you should focus on the keyword phrase. Either write good content or search for off site content to bring in to bring focus to your keyword phrase. Make this page a complete authority on your keyword phrase. Use images, article links, rss feeds and any other resource you can think of to highlight the keyword phrase. Remember, search engines are looking for good, original content to enhance their search results. Give them what they are looking for.

Off Site Optimization

A good way of looking at this is to think of pointing people to your site much like posting signs around town. How often are you driving around and see realtor signs pointing you to a home for sale or to a new neighborhood? How about other small signs advertising a new business or other local small business?

Off site optimization is a fancy way of saying you need to post signs around town to draw attention to your business. Only your "town" is nothing smaller than the entire planet!

Inbound links are regarded highly by Google and other search engines. Think of an inbound link as a vote for your site as being of interest. Search engines want interesting sites to enhance their results. The more links (votes) your site gets from other interesting sites, the better. Remember to avoid link farms as sites are sometimes penalized for their links to these sites.

Here are some places to post your signs around town:

• Free classified ads. There are several sites that allow you to post free classified ads with links to your site. A word of caution here. Only use reputable sites. There are several that are spam sites. Check each out carefully before proceeding.
• If you are not a blooger, become one. Place your website link in the signature of each posting. Actively contribute to blogs and you will be amazed at the responses you receive and the traffic that is generated.
• Write articles. Make no mistake. The primary reason that I am taking time to write this article is obtain inbound links to our sites.
• True link exchanges. While not as important as even a year ago, exchanging links with a related site is still a good thing. A related site would be a site that compliments your site or even competes with it on some level. Completely and utterly avoid links to sites that has a primary purpose of exchanging links.

Site Submission

There are any number of sites offering to submit your site to over 1,500,000 search engines. Folks, you don't need that many submissions. The vast majority of those sites are nothing more than spammers looking for your E-mail.

Google, MSN and Yahoo all have their own site submission pages. Yahoo does require that you have an account to submit the page. Other than that, it is a pretty simple procedure and doesn't take a huge amount of effort. They are easy to find. Use the search engine to find it! Enter 'site submission, MSN' into Google and see how fast the site submission page is found.

Time Frame For Results

It varies. There are so many factors to consider to give even a 'guesstimate' is wrong, other than to say that whatever effort you put into SEO will return some level of results.

What I am confident in promising is that if you concentrate on providing the search engines with original and quality content presented in a logical and understandable manner they will respond by ranking your site. Each of our sites were ranked within weeks of the site going live for certain keyword phrases and we continue to climb in other areas.

Yes, you do have to work at SEO. However, the results are well worth the time, and you keep the dime.

Nathan Lewis has over 25 years of experience applying technology to solve complex small business problems.

Mr. Lewis is a Platinum level author with Ezinearticles.com and has been publised in print and internationally on the Internet.

Please visit some of Mr. Lewis' recent launches:

• CJ Gift Baskets
• CJ Picnic Baskets
• CJ Patio and Grill