I have yet to see Meryl Streep’s movie The Iron Lady, but I noticed a poster as I was walking Lucy (Level343′s official mascot!) this morning. “Never Compromise” jumped out of the poster at me. Isn’t that the truth; it’s something I’ve been struggling with for the past year as I continue to run and grow my business.

I can honestly say I enjoy working with people who stand by their convictions. I enjoy working with people who never compromise their business or personal ethics – no, not even for money. Some may find it hard to believe there are still people like that, but there are.

How can you run a business without walking a fine line of compromise? Especially when that business is online in B2B services and you’re aiming for long term clients?

Case in point: look at what’s happening with search. In April alone, there were 52 highlights to Google’s latest algorithm changes. That in itself has given way to a plethora of news feeds regarding all the compromises businesses have made in order to rank for their keywords.

We have warnings to tighten the reins on questionable SEO methods going out in light of the latest updates, such as this one from Search Engine Land, written by Kerry Dean of PMG:

“If you are managing SEO and link building for a big brand, I recommend ceasing all paid link building campaigns. I’m sure I’ll take some heat for that recommendation, but I just can’t recommend paid link building to big brands right now. It’s just too risky at this point in time.”

Businesses have to be warned to pull it in? Maybe it’s not exactly “bad business practices” so much as it is “bad ranking practices”, but why does there need to be a warning at all?

How Much Are You Willing to Bend for Success?

Level343 is kind of a strange cat when it comes to our industry peers. Our new headquarters are in San Francisco. We have a satellite office in Kansas City. We have less than ten full time employees, one full time doggy mascot and have yet to find an actual office in San Fran. Though small, we’re an international marketing company; I speak five languages fluently, and have partners in every corner of the world.

We could be bigger.

We could have more people on staff.

We could have satellite offices in other parts of the world instead of business partners.

We could be a lot of things we’re not.

But –

I’m not willing to bend. I’m not willing to cut corners. Although I’ve sometimes walked the line, I don’t believe I’ve ever crossed it. My team feels the same way.

No Comment

It’s cost us some potential clients. We’ve had potentials come to us who wanted us to do (choose your questionable technique here). We turned them down with a “We’re sorry. We don’t do that, here. We can (insert other technique), however, and here’s why.” Sometimes, offering a viable replacement keeps them with us. Sometimes it doesn’t.

It’s cost us some potentially excellent team members. We’ve been accused of “doing too much” or “giving too much” by previous partners on jobs. We’ve been accused of being too fussy with the work we provide our clients. We’ve been laughed at for tweaking our reporting because 1) Jahnelle’s a data freak and loves Excel sheets and 2) we want to give actionable reports. We want the client to see, in one report (and preferably one page), what’s happening with their web presence.

These things are important to us, because our clients’ online successes often depend on them.

Square Peg in a Round Hole? Maybe…

Sometimes I feel like a square peg in a round hole. It’s not like staying on the “up and up” comes natural. CYA is born into everyone. But see, that’s what makes us different from the animals – the fact that we have a choice to do, or not.

It’s hard sticking to our guns sometimes, especially when money is tight and a potential walks up with a questionable 10k/month project. On the rare occasion that we aren’t quite as meticulous with our accounts receivables as we should be and a client decides they don’t have to pay for delivered work  – well, it’s hard not to go hacker ninja on them and drop their site into the shredders. Maybe 301 some porn wheels their way and other not-quite-proper actions to “help” them rank for triple X terms.

Point is, even though our actions may not be the gut reaction variety – even though the ethical thought is the second thought -, we haven’t compromised.

Pandas, Penguins… Poodles…?

I may regret saying this, but – we’ve watched the Google updates pass, and rode them out with little difficulty. We’ve babysat our clients’ sites and patted their URLs as the traffic meandered in much like it did before the updates. Although the updates have brought us new clients looking for help to fix their crashing traffic, they’ve yet to lose us a client to someone else.

The Rise Of The Penguins

I think – and feel free to chime in on this – we’ve ridden these things out because we’ve never compromised. We’ve never compromised on our link building practices, choosing viral and organic above paid linking strategies. We’ve never compromised on content development, choosing high quality articles over spun or $1 per 2,000 word articles. We’ve never compromised where it comes to proudly displaying our clients’ brands, choosing to make sure everything we do in their name provides a positive example.

Have You Compromised?

Many business owners are staring at their analytics and traffic data right now. Many are watching their rank drop and wondering what to do. Some of the less informed may actually be wondering what happened. What may have happened is too much compromise.

Because, let’s face facts: when Google’s Penguin update creates mass unemployment in India because people have been paying for cheap labor and cheaper tactics rather than actually doing the work necessary for long lasting results….

Then a lot of businesses have compromised…

A day in the office

Recently, we posted Comment Spam vs. Comment Links: What’s the Difference? and received some great comments based on our readers’ opinions. Ironically, one commenter proved the point we were trying to make, about how links in comments can enhance a conversation without being spam.

Gail Gardner, social media marketing and Internet strategist of GrowMap.com, left an excellent comment (thanks, Gail, and welcome to the Level343 SEO Article Archive) on the article… and here is where this article begins.

Cutting Off the Conversation

“If the only reason for you being on an article is to post a comment and build links, you’re in danger of committing the SEO sin of comment spam. Tread carefully. However, if you’re at an article to read it, are moved to comment, have written or read a piece that you want to share with others, and so post the link with your comment, this is not spam. This is communicating, engaging and building a community.” – Quote from Comment Spam vs. Comment Links

Now, we hope Gail will forgive us, because we’re going to tear her comment apart to show our point…

This is a subject near and dear to my heart and I may have written more posts on it than most any other blogger around (that I know of anyway).

She may not be the most prolific writer about spam, but she’s definitely written quite a few articles on the topic. It’s important to note these articles aren’t “How I Hate Spam” or “All Spammers Must Die”, etc. They are well researched, in depth articles (see: Akismet Deletes Comments Bloggers NEVER SEE!) about the topic.

There is definitely NO CONSENSUS across the blogosphere on what comments are spam and which are not. I know that because I did a Twtpoll Spam or Not Spam post where you can read the results.

GrowMap Poll on Comment Spam

Really? Now that sounds interesting. It really does. However, because Gail is a conscientious poster, she left out the link. We had to hunt for it. Now, TwtPoll: SPAM or NOT SPAM – YOU Decide was a pretty small poll as these things go; 15 people responded. However, it still says a lot that 4 of them (27%!) said they’d consider a comment with a link as spam.

Would you believe some bloggers flag as spam any comment they don’t like while others will flag any comment that links to a business and some even flag as spammers any comment from anyone they don’t know. (THAT is why Akismet can NEVER work unless they implement a fundamental change in how it flags spam – see my recent post on Crowdsourcing for more details on that or the many, many posts I’ve done about Akismet deleting our comments and being rude to our commentators.)

This… this is frustrating. We’d love to see the many posts about Akismet that Gail has written, but there’s no link. This means, we again have to spend time hunting them down.

…see my recent post on Crowdsourcing…

The Power of Crowdsourcing by 99designs

Ummm… where? Does this mean we can find a post about crowdsourcing on GrowMap (It does, but we didn’t know that)? Can we find the information somewhere on one of the 43,000 search results for “crowdsourcing, Gail Gardner”? Where is this recent post?

I wrote a post about believing in the Google Fairy for those who buy the silly notion that if you do nothing to build links your blog or site will somehow still be found.

Again, we would have loved to see what Gail had to say on the subject. It might be something that might bring us around to another way of viewing things. It might be an article that inspires us to write a response. It could be several things, but we’ll never know, because searching for “believing in the Google Fairy” didn’t bring up her article (it did, however, bring up ours…).

Personally I love CommentLuv for the reasons I explain in my post about how it grows businesses and blogs and that post explains my suggestions on how bloggers and businesses can mutually benefit from developing relationships through commenting.

HEEEELP! Where are we now? What post? After finally finding the Google Fairy article, we read down and there’s nothing about CommentLuv. We’d love to see what reasons she has for liking the plugin. We’d like to read her suggestions about developing relationships. We’d love to have read just one of these articles she talks about… but we can’t.

She didn’t post any links.

Why?

She didn’t want to be thought of as a spammer.

With at least four links in her comment, most bloggers would drop her into the spam bin if Akismet didn’t get there first.

The lack of links, plain and simple, cut off the conversation.

Putting Our Money Where Our Mouth Is

Well, putting our blog where our mouth is, anyway. We love conversation, whether it happens here or on another blog. Over the past months, we’ve done a few things, like making sure the automatic nofollow was removed.

We THOUGHT we’d see a huge spike in spam. In watching our little spam basket, it’s amazing… things didn’t change for the worst. We have more traffic now than a year ago, and a lower spam to comment ratio.

Last week, we also added linking guidelines to the bottom of our posts and added CommentLuv for our readers. Lastly, we’re trying out the GrowMap Anti-Spambot Plugin, and have retired Akismet for the time being.

How you run your blog is your business, but we don’t want our readers to feel inhibited. We don’t want you to cut off a conversation because you didn’t want to be thought of (or blocked) as a spammer. If you have a related link you think our other readers would enjoy or find useful, please, share it with us.

We want to know more about you – do you have a favorite article you’ve written or read? Just this once, we’re opening up this comment to unrelated links. Let’s see what kind of conversation we can get going!

News Flash - by Kimmi

When you ask about getting links for your organic SEO marketing, you’re often told to start article writing – but is it an easy way to get links? Well, sure – but is it an easy way to get traffic? Yes, if you’re good at it. No, if you churn out poorly written articles with the same information as thousands of other articles out there.

First of all, back links in the right places can give your website great exposure. Article marketing is certainly one of the easiest ways to gain viable links… if you’re good at writing articles or are prepared to pay a ghostwriter to write them for you.

The concept of article marketing goes like this:

1. You write an article and put a compelling resource box with your website link at the end of the content.
2. You submit your article to an article site, gaining a back link.
3. Depending on which site you submitted to, that site passes your article on to other sites, which provide you with more back links.
4. People read your article and pass it on to others so your site gets exposure.
5. Some of those people publish your article on their websites or blogs – more links, more exposure.
6. Other people publish your article in their newsletters – more links, more exposure.
7. Still others may publish your article in an eZine or eBook – more links, more exposure.

Now, the hope is your article will go from 1 to 7. It might… if it’s interesting and/or unusual. Another hope is at step 2, where you submit your article to a very topic relevant site, such as a health site (instead of article directory) for a health article. You then get a very relevant back link, as well as relevant traffic.

Here are a few reasons why some articles never get to #7:

• Many articles currently available on the web are… well, blah. They’re boring, with standard (or sub-standard) information that’s been shared several times before in exactly the same way.
• Many articles are written using poor English or poor structure. They’re difficult to read, difficult to understand and so, are destined to lay on the cutting room floor. These articles are the wallflowers of content at the copywriting dance, never to be taken out and shown to the world.
• Some articles are well written, with great English, perfect grammar and excellent flow, but so full of industry terms the average layperson can’t understand them. They might be seen, but often, you want the layperson coming to your site, right? After all, if you have a business to consumer (B2C) company, you want the consumer – not your competition – to understand what you’re saying.

Many think the answer to not reaching #7 is to just add volume to their article marketing. If two articles don’t perform well, maybe putting out twenty would help. It seems reasonable; it’ll bring twenty beautiful links.

Yet, what are links without traffic? In addition, it’s probably helpful to realize that, while Yahoo may count ten links from the same site as ten links, Google generally only counts it once. To Google: 500 links from the same site = 1 link from the site. If you’re going for quantity rather than quality, you’d better find a few hundred article sites.

Before your next article marketing campaign, ask yourself what article marketing is for, and look at the sites you’ve previously used. You see, although article marketing brings back links, it’s really recognition you want. You want to garner enough positive attention that people start coming to you as an industry expert.

Rather than submit, submit, submit, be the industry expert you are. Consider the information you’ve gathered through the years as a high commodity. Don’t share it with the world; be picky (or precise, if you’d like a more professional word) about the sites you put that information on. If you carefully consider each site in terms of relevance, traffic and interested visitors – and carefully write your articles in terms of quality, tone and information – your article marketing will be a grand success. Would love to hear your input.

SEOs talk a lot about “high quality” links. “High quality links are a great way to gain traffic and site authority”. Do they ever explain what defines “high quality”? Are you frustrated by trying to figure what this elusive breed of link is? In this article, we’re taking away the frustration by sharing eight characteristics for true, all-around, high quality links. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Follow/NoFollow: Preferably, you want links with the “follow” attribute. If you’re only worried about higher traffic, the follow/no follow attribute isn’t an issue, but for higher keyword ranking and PR, “follow” sites are of higher quality.

2. Few competing links: The fewer the links on the page going to other sites, the better. Even though your mother taught you to share, in the case of link building, being stingy is the best way to be.

3. High PageRank: The higher the PR of the page itself (not the site), the better. Pages with high PR indicate to the search engines that your site bears attention. As well, if a higher PR is your goal, it will take a greater amount of low PR sites linking to raise your rank than it will high PR sites. Don’t snub your nose at low PR sites, though; low PR sites have the potential to become high quality links and, in some instances, can bring a lot of traffic.

4. Relevant to your site: Although the site linking to yours is important, pay close attention to the actual page. Is the linking page relevant to your linked site page? For instance, if your page is about hearing aids and a hearing aid website links to yours, that’s great. However, if the page with your link actually has “hearing aids” in the text, title and meta tags, it gives the link more relevance.

5. Contain your keyword: One of the most common mistakes in link building is to use www.mysite.com as the anchor text (i.e. the actual words you click on). Most businesses will already rank well for their name and website address. If keyword ranking is one of your goals, it’s especially important that you pay careful attention to the text used to link to your page. The word(s) should be the keyword(s) you targeted on your page.

6. Links to specific pages: Contrary to popular opinion, most visitors don’t come to your website through the home page. As well, you don’t want only your home page ranking in the search engine results. If you’ve used your keywords correctly, each page will have a different set; optimally, you want each page to rank well for their keyword set. Preferably, you want high quality links that point to specific, relevant pages on your site, not just your home page.

7. High traffic: The more traffic the linking site gets, the better chance you have of gaining more traffic. Of course, high traffic sites generally expect something in return, such as excellent content that can genuinely help their visitors who follow the link to your site.

8. One way: Reciprocal links, where you have a link to the site and that site links to you, is like swapping gum. Unless the site has a higher PR than yours, or higher ranking with your keyword, they don’t give much benefit unless your purpose is specifically just traffic; in this case, they may give tons of benefit. Otherwise, you’re basically swapping authority. One way links, where the site only links to yours, gives the best benefit in terms of ranking and authority.

The above characteristics generally leave out directory and article submissions, practices that are slowly falling out of the “mainstream” anyway, due to overuse and abuse. Don’t leave them out of your link building campaign, but do be extremely meticulous about the submission sites you choose, as well as the specific page (for directories) your link is on.

As you begin (or continue) your link building campaign, keep these characteristics in mind. Research potential sites using the characteristics as a guideline. With high quality links, you can create a truly fantastic campaign with excellent return on the time invested.

Maapu's Candles

Uploading a useful and well-crafted article on the Net without search engine optimization is like getting ready for your Oscar debut and remaining hidden in the closet. Unless your clients come to your house, peek inside the closet to find you and spread the word, the chances of you being seen are slim. The same can be said for your well-crafted article. However, a well-written page can ensure organic traffic that can last the test of time.

One must understand more than just the basics of SEO. It’s 2010 and we are dealing with different search engines, as well as a more educated and savvy users. You must first find optimal keywords and phrases to lead a maximum campaign that results in organic and targeted traffic. All marketing decisions for the SEO campaign have to be made on hard data, not educated guesses. Tracking is also very important, so make sure your website tracking provides important metrics.

When a user keys in a search query, regardless of what search engine used, web pages come down like a tsunami. Inevitably, search engine results and users’ requirements do not always meet in a hand-in-glove manner, but web crawlers manage the selection process to give you optimal results… or so it seems. The way pages are selected and offered from those floodtides in seconds would look like a miracle, and this miracle is made possible because of a strong SEO keyword campaign.

Keyword research, keyword use, and link building are some of the more important aspects of successful SEO.

Keywords are extremely important for any SEO campaign, because matching keywords with content is the only bait that search engines will swallow. As of now, the web crawlers that select the pages are blind to the beauty of the rest of the page, such as beautiful graphics. They do their job by matching the keywords visitor type to the content found on a particular web page. Not to beat a dead horse, but let’s repeat: the first step for any successful SEO is research, test, and data mine keywords user/ customers are likely to use.

Okay, so now we have that out of the way, what’s next?

Keywords have to be progressively narrowed; often they may need to be twisted out of shape to make them effective in an SEO campaign. For example, if you want to advertise a holiday villa in Canberra, you might have to coin different keywords like “holiday villa Canberra”, “Canberra holiday villa”, “holiday villa Canberra Australia”, or “villa holiday Canberra”. Since these keywords can’t all be naturally squeezed into the same page, the promoter will need different articles to use each keyword phrase.

Since there is no end to the idiosyncrasies of those searching things online, a keyword can be anything in order to satisfy SEO campaign requirements. For example if, by keyword research, it is found that too many people refer to Australia as “down under”, then you may have to write new content integrating the phrase “holiday villa down under”. Some of these keyword phrases may be linguistically unacceptable, but a successful SEO campaign often requires that we say goodbye to the Queen’s English. Now, this doesn’t mean your content has to suck, nor does it have to have every keyword on a single page. On the contrary – be creative and natural!

How can I find the perfect keywords for my business?

It is clear to anyone paying attention that search engines have not been the only ones to change; people have changed the way they search. In its simplest form, think of the search engines as the dealers of information – the middlemen. They bond customers and sellers with keywords. In turn, those keywords become part of the language, modified to bridge the two.

Once the right keywords and phrases are short-listed, the next step is to weave these keywords into content of the site, blog or article, together with researched material and relevant data. This marriage between data and keywords might often be a marriage of convenience, but it is up to the writer to make it a real marriage. The right keywords in the title, as well as natural placement through the articles, are a must for successful SEO.

Link building is another aspect to consider when building this campaign. Link building is as much a part of your reputation as it is part of your user’s experience. Understand that true, useful link building is not about sending out a generic “let’s do links” email to just any site owner. A strong campaign must be well thought out, with a researched (“researched” is the key word, here) list of potential partners that can enhance your credibility.

In reality, link building is more about a connection: social proof, reputation, accountability – and, of course, R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Turns out, respect is important, even in the business world. Link building doesn’t have to be a full time job, but it will take some active participation on your part, as well as the ability to say “no” to the wrong type of link invitations. Always focus on quality, rather than quantity.

Before accepting a link, ask yourself:

• Will these links really help my visitors?
• Are these links from relative, upstanding Web, blog or article sites?
• Are there tons of links on the suggested page (the more outgoing links from a page, the less link juice you get)?
• Is the linking site getting traffic?

Guest blogging is a great way to build links. For instance, when writing a guest article, you are typically allowed to include a few links, as well as your biography. Guest blogging provides several benefits, such as:

• Increased exposure
• Increased chances for recognition
• Links back to your site from the biography
• Increased authority

As well, linking out to good blogs will help, although not (necessarily) with your SEO. By linking to other great, relevant blogs or articles, you increase the value of your own blog for your readers. Increased value means increased recognition, which, in turn, means increased readers. For SEO, however, the more willing you are to spread around the glory (i.e. posting relevant links within an article whether they’re your links or not), the more likely other bloggers will be willing to do the same with your blogs.

Finally, while managing your SEO campaign remember the ultimate goal. Ultimately, you aren’t building a website, working on a blog or writing an article to attract search engines. Ultimately, you’re trying to attract clients. If you can’t decide whether you’ve overdone the linking and keywords, always err on the side of caution. Search engines may find you, but populate your website with improperly written SEO content and you’ll lose the visitors (i.e. potential customers) you worked so hard to get.

In conclusion (there is an end to this I promise) everything you upload on the Internet will hold value for the success and future of your business. Things like trust, experience, influence, connection, reputation, credibility are what will solidify your place on the Internet, no matter what search engine people use.

by Saul GM

In 2010, many of the “Big Boys” will be spending the same or less on their paid placements in the search engine results. Bad News for Google, Yahoo, AOL and Bing, but equally bad news for small business owners who have skipped out on paying for ads from the beginning.

Why is it bad news? Because the “big boys” (i.e big companies) are redoubling their social marketing efforts and pouring big bucks into SEO, potentially drowning out the less well funded competition. Don’t start breaking a sweat and hanging an html “Going Out of Business” sign on your website just yet, however. You can still get the social networking catch you need to keep yourself in business and not pay for it.

Search out the competition like a celebrity Paparazzo; be where they are and predict where they are going. Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and MySpace are the likely hangouts for your corporate Goliath competition. Like David and his little slingshot, start casting stones where your competition is not.

There are smaller social networking opportunities, which can be better than the larger ones for reaching your specific customer base. Instead of casting a wide net in the ocean of networking, focus your efforts on the small coves where schools of your customers are hanging out, ready to take your bait. Xanga, Meetup, Xing, Hi5 and others are wide-open options to stake your claim of their market.

When you do stake a claim to a plot on the larger social networks like FB and MySpace, be unique. Your competition can’t be everything to everyone at all times, and you have the opportunity to fill in the gaps. Be online more often than your competition, post more and more useful information to your blog, incorporate different media into your online profile; make your page an experience and not a reflection of your website!

Getting Dirty: the pseudo immorality of buying links

There are a couple of purists out there who take real moral issue with buying links.  Is the practice of buying links really “dirty” or are those who can’t afford to buy links or have some primal fear of the SERP gods’ wrath peppering the discussion with conjecture and possibilities that never seem to materialize for dirty linkers?

The point of linking is to score points with the search engines and climb up some imaginary rope to the top of the results page.  If you have a new website it may take a very long time to reach page one, and no amount of linking, purchased or otherwise, is going to get you there if your web page is an abomination. For arguments sake your website is perfect but you are still nowhere to be seen on the SERPs , do you break down and buy links or do you wait for some benevolent website owner with high rankings to throw you a rope ?

Don’t believe all the hype about getting blacklisted by the search engines for having a few dirty links, in reality dirty links are the least of their concern when evaluating your website.  Google’s own words on purchasing links  “Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such.” Buying a link is no more dirty than buying a button advertisement, the goal is one in the same, is it not?  You are paying for something in one place that you could get for free somewhere else, but if you really, really want THAT link and you’re willing to pay for it then by all means fork over the cash.

If your PR is perpetually low, and your scruples are fading fast and you’ve done everything the “right” way with no luck, dip your toe into the muddy waters of link buying. Beware, be spare, and be ready to trade that dirty link if and when an equally good link comes along to take its’ place.  Don’t feel the need either to atone for your SEO sins since it’s only the small business owner buying links that Google or the other search engines call “dirty”. Add a couple million dollars to your company’s net worth and the search engines would be calling you a corporation instead.

In part one of “SEO Simplified”, we talked about the differences between forced and organic SEO.  Never mind the differences, though – how does it work?  What makes it better than any other approach?

Firstly, it’s user-based, not search engine based.  This is the biggest difference, and what makes all the difference.  A user-based website should be built for:

• Convenience – How convenient is your website?  Do people have to hunt for links and information?
• Simplicity – Did you get all complicated while setting your site up?  Did you over design your shopping cart button, thinking it’d be neat?  If you used words like “new, exciting design” or “innovative”, you might want to run a focus group test.  It may not be as neat as you think it is.
• Information – Again, it all comes down to content.  Are you building an information center on your products or are you just selling them?  If a visitor has to search for the information on another site, they may very well leave yours and never come back.  A lack of information can cause the loss of hundreds, if not thousands (depending on your traffic) of customers.

Now, this doesn’t mean your website shouldn’t be properly optimized.  By all means, get your code cleaned up, your tags fixed and page titles written correctly.  Once your site is optimized, however, build up that content!

Growing With Organic SEO

Ultimately, if your optimizer does their job, you’ll be getting traffic.  That traffic will be reading the information on your site.  If that information is keyword dense (not rich, but thick with keywords), it will read something like this:

“Organic SEO is great.  Many wonder about Organic SEO, so here is the information.  Organic SEO is user based, not search engine based.  Organic SEO brings in what is referred to as “natural” traffic.”

Ugh.  Not only is it painful to read, it’s painful to write.  If you were looking for information, would you want to read crap like that?  The answer is a resounding, “No”.  Even if you’d never heard about optimization, you’d know there was something funky going on.  This is search engine based.

User-based content is just like what you’re reading here.  Although the keyphrase is “organic SEO”, you’ll only see it where the content supports it and where it’s relevant.  This is where the organic growth starts.  Here’s the growth tree:

1.  You have good, relevant, user-based content that informs, engages and/or entertains, either on the site pages or on the blog.

2.  You or your optimizer set up ways for that content to be spread around, either through email, any number of social bookmarking/media sites and rss feeds.

3.  As you post on your blog or add pages to your site, send them out to the bookmarking and media sites.  However, since nobody likes someone who only talks about themselves, find relevant, interesting information elsewhere and send out those, too.  A little love never hurt anyone.

4.  Those who read what you’ve sent out will also forward it to someone they know, assuming they like the content, which will bring more visitors.

5.  As time goes by, you will be able to watch a steady rise in visitors, people subscribing to your feed, etc.  This can happen in as little as a month, or as long as three months before you get more than ten or eleven visitors, so have patience!

6.  Webmasters will link to your content, because they think it’s relevant to their readers.  If it’s relevant to their readers, their link is relevant to your site.  This brings a positive “vote” for your page, which helps to raise your PageRank, as well as your ranking in the search engine results.

7.  At the same time, this is building a mindset in your visitors.  All the information you’re putting out is creating the impression of “expert”.  YOU are the person/business to go to for the information, which means that if they need expert help, you’re the person/business to use.

8.  Eventually, you may find that you no longer have to send out those blogs or pages.  Your visitors are bringing in traffic for you.

This is true organic SEO.  You will reach a point to where, as long as you keep putting out content, visitors will keep coming to read it and webmasters will continue to link to it.  If you have a sale, you mix your organic SEO with Pay-Per-Click and other ad-based programs for the duration of the sale.

A few tips to remember:

• Once you start putting out content, you can’t afford to stop for more than a few weeks.  You WILL start losing your regular visitors and you will have to start building your reader base up again.
• Don’t use your content as a platform to bash the competition.  It’s not pretty and visitors WILL get tired of reading about it.  Keep it nice!
• If you’re using a forum, knowledge base, article base or blog, host them on your site if possible.  Remember, search engines LOVE content, and show that love by raising your rank.  By hosting the main source of your site content on another hosting platform, you’re loosing a lot of potential ranking.  In addition, this can cause confusion for the visitors and takes them away from your main purpose – to bring them to your site and keep them there.