Content developers R’ Us. Using the highest forms of technological pen and ink (to wit, the computer), we craft humorous, informative, selling copy – not for just anybody, but for your target market. We talk about content on our service pages, emphasize it heavily in our articles (have you seen our Content Development section?), and use it with blunt force against our clients’ competitors. We call it content domination, and it works a little something like this…

Now You're Ready

Developing Content Strategies & Tactics

A strategy is immutable. It doesn’t change. It’s a “Big Picture” kind of thing. When you’re developing strategies, you do so by looking at the big picture and saying things like:

• People don’t come to us for answers; we need to increase our authority.
• Our brand is not well known; we need to publicize our company, products and/or services.
• Our site ranking across major search engines is low; we need to rise in the ranks.
• Our traffic is non-existent; we need to become more prominent and invite conversation.
• We consitently rank below our competitors; we need to dominate the competition.

Tactics, on the other hand, change depending on technology, open doors and current capabilities. When you’re developing tactics, you do so by looking at individual areas and saying things like:

• We need to increase our authority; we’re going to do this by guest blogging on authority sites.
• We need to publicize our company, products and/or services; we’re going to do this by publishing press releases.
• We need to rise in the ranks; we’re going to do this through organic, passive link building.
• We need to become more prominent and invite conversation; we’re going to do this by creating informative, entertaining content worth linking to and talking about.
• We need to dominate the competition; we’re going to do this by careful insertion of targeted content into the SERPs.

Even though these seem clear-cut, they are subject to changes. For example, although you can guest blog on authority sites, which sites you use can change drastically. While you may always target your content, the target itself may change. While you may plan on publishing press releases, what if your company has no news to speak of?

Tactics have to be flexible. Strategies, such as increase our authority, are set in stone.

Dominating with Content, One Piece of Copy at a Time

King Content and Queen SEO

It is possible to dominate with content using only copywriters. Where an organic SEO specialist comes in, however, is ensuring that each piece of content targets a specific niche area. If you’re going to put so much effort into something, you might as well make sure you’re targeting the most profitable areas, non?

With content domination, each piece of copy that goes out serves a specific purpose. For example, guest blogging on authority sites helps build your authority, but doesn’t necessarily work to invite conversation on your own site. Creating content worth linking to may invite conversation, but it doesn’t necessarily help dominate the competition.

To dominate – the competition, in the SERPs, through traffic, through authority – you have to carefully consider each strategy and develop specific tactics. Let’s walk through an example:

Strategy: Dominate the Competition
Tactic: Careful insertion of targeted content into the SERPs
Methods:

• Keyword research – It does no good to rank above your competitors if you’re targeting the wrong key terms. Sure, you may get traffic, but if people are coming to your site from the search query bugs life, and you sell bug spray, it’s not going to do you much good. Keyword research provides an in depth review of the terms that actually fit your site, your services/products, and buyer/information hunter personas. Thus, when you rank, you’re ranking for terms that will actually do some good.
• Competitor research – Is Wal-Mart your competitor? What about Overstock? Not really – not if you’re a small business, and most especially if you sell products or services much different than they. When talking about online competition, your actual competitors are any business ranking for the same terms as your company. These are the ones you want to watch.
• Rank monitoring – Where are you ranking? Where are your competitors ranking? You have to keep a careful on the SERPs, because they change rapidly. All it takes is the competition putting content out a few times without you matching them, and they can knock you off the front page.
• On demand content development – Once you rank at the top, you can’t sit there fat, dumb and happy. You have to fight to get there, and you have to fight to keep that position. To do so, you have to have on-demand content development.

Pulling It All Together – The Fight For the Top

Now What?

You have your targeted key terms, you know who your competitors are, and you’re now monitoring your ranking to the best of your ability. Now what?

The Internet is a content mill, constantly outputting information through various websites, blogs and news sites, etc. The job of on demand content development is to make sure your content gets out there at a rate that’s fast enough to keep you ranking, without being so fast that you bombard your readers and the Web with content spam. How do you do that?

1. Monitor your site ranking for your key terms, watching for a slight drop.
2. As your site drops (it will, for even mildly competitive terms), you counterattack.
3. Depending on the term, you create a well-written, informative, engaging piece of content that targets that term, and publish it on your site.
4. For a brief moment in time (relatively speaking), that article ranks at the top, above the competition.
5. Rinse and repeat across terms.

Caveats to Content Domination

There are several caveats to content domination, but there are also several work arounds:

Caveat: For the results to be quick, your site already has to have a good reputation and authority in the eyes of the search engines.
Work around: If you have access to authority sites, you can borrow their authority by guest posting. While this doesn’t generate the same amount of traffic to your site, it does put your content at the top of the SERPs.

Caveat: For the results to last, they have to be talked about and linked to. The more activity on the page, the better chance you have of staying high in the SERPs for a longer period of time.
Work around: If you have low amounts of traffic, it’s best to incorporate social media and active content marketing into your tactics. Strong articles can get much higher traffic returns for a low traffic site when social and content are combined.

Caveat: Content domination works best if your site is up to par with the current search engine expectations, such as site speed.
Work around: Performing a website audit before implementing your content campaign is highly recommended (in fact, we require it for most, if not all, of our projects).

Caveat: Content domination is not sales. It’s marketing. It’s driving targeted, trusting traffic (say that three times fast) to your site, so there is the possibility of sales. Your site has to do the rest.
Work around: There isn’t one, other than to make sure your site holds all the essentials needed to convert: calls to action (CTAs), converting sales copy, and easy guides (visible shopping cart, strong product or service descriptions, privacy terms,  shipping policies, etc), are just a few.

At The End of The Day

At the End of the Day…

Content domination works. You end up with an authoritative site with the information to back it up. You become a trusted resource for information on your industry. It helps to increase engagement, continue the conversation and build your brand story. The more seriously you take each piece of content you publish, no matter where you publish it, the better you’ll do.

Hillbillyhood

That’s IT. I’ve had enough of online newspapers writing things about SEO. I really have. I happened to come across this article by The Globe and Mail. The Globe and Mail, ya’ll.

I don’t have anything against The Globe and Mail, anymore than I have something against the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal (who’ve written about SEO lately). There’s nothing wrong with them, IF I want to read the news.

However, when I read an article written by someone who isn’t in the SEO world – isn’t even on the outskirts of the SEO industry – well, it’s brings out the hillbilly hood in me. I have this insane urge to grab their faces, look deep in their eyes and say kindly, “shut the hell up”.

So this Globe and Mail article: the writer, Ivor Tossel, has some good information. As a former programmer, he probably knows a thing or two. Hell, he could probably teach me a thing or two. He even says some of the right stuff, like, “And SEO really is a whole industry – entirely devoted to making websites more prominent on Google and its competitors.”

Then he has to ruin it. “It isn’t a terribly technical practice,” he says. “Anyone can do it. There doesn’t need to be much, if any, programming involved.” Then, he adds the big whopper:

“Instead, it’s achieved by manipulating the content of pages – their titles, the links they contain, and their words and pictures. The basics of SEO are accessible to anyone.”

To top it all off, the single comment says,

“A lot of SEO amounts to trying to gain a search ranking unwarranted by the site’s content. A good search engine should sort the wheat from the chaff. Much of SEO tries to game the system… Dollars ploughed into content will do more for you than the same amount blown on SEO. If you focus on content you have nothing to fear from the latest Google dance.”

Mhmm. Right. Okay.

Now, I don’t know who Steve St-Laurent (the comment writer) is. Nor do I particularly care. He could be the top SEO honcho of the Internet and I’d still be irritated. Between the New York Times articles and this one (Handle SEO With Care), the SEO industry sounds like a cesspool of suspicious looking, sneaky characters from spy novels.

Why does all this piss me off? It’s not that I feel SEO is being attacked. On the contrary. I think Ivor is genuinely interested in walking people down the SEO lane. The inaccuracy gets my goat. Inaccuracy, when newspapers supposedly pride themselves in accurate reporting. Yeah, right.

And Mr. Tossel is planning on writing a 4 part series about SEO… For the record, I hope it’s not too full of inaccuracies.

SEO isn’t technical.

You know, I was just saying that same thing to Gabriella, while reading through lines of code to find all the places that might need tweaking. Okay, so there’s a little sarcasm here.

Maybe coding isn’t the same as writing in C++, etc. Maybe optimization isn’t technical when compared to programming. I don’t know. I’m not a programmer. What I do know is that I spend a lot of time cleaning up code on clients’ websites. I know we spend hours pouring over sites and analytic data – before we ever start the campaign.

What I also know is that “technical” is subjective. If we tell a client they need to optimize their alt image attributes and they say, “What,” this is technical to them. If they ask, “Where do I put this meta data stuff,” it’s technical. When we’re troubleshooting why a client’s site isn’t being properly indexed… drum roll please… it’s technical.

Let’s also consider the creation of optimized, yet marketable page titles and descriptions.

We demand a lot out of these little search snippets. They have to be optimized; they have to be relevant. They have to appeal to the target market so the target market will be interested enough to click through. They have to carry the brand’s message.

We have a total of 226 characters, with spaces, to achieve all this. If you don’t know how to do it, it’s technical. Because all technical really means, you see, is that an action belongs or pertains to a specific art, science or industry. So, while the art of SEO may not be technical in the terms of, “Hey, Joe – what do I have to do to get this lamp socket to work,” it does take a certain amount of skill to perform.

Follow Google’s best practices. 

Google's Best Practices

Ivor correctly points out that Google has a comprehensive SEO starter guide. It’s a list of “what to do if you want to be ranked by Google”. Great; but let’s revisit it in light of recent updates, shall we?

Google best practices say…

• Create unique title tags for each page
• Accurately describe the page’s content
• Use brief, but descriptive titles

Awesome. Sweet. Totally cool n stuff. So you do all that, right? Then your unique, accurate, descriptive titles appear in the SERPs just the way they should, right? Maybe… if the search engine doesn’t just rewrite them. Yes, ladies and gents – Google (search engine, not company) can “decide” to rewrite your carefully crafted titles.

Google best practices say…

• Offer quality content
• Create fresh, unique content
• Write easy-to-read text

Hey, sounds good to me. This kind of advice brings search engines and visitors, so it’s a win-win. Yet, the Panda update, which targeted content farms, made a big hole for content scrappers to take over. What does this mean? It means someone can come along and decide they like your content. They can copy your fresh, quality, unique, easy-to-read text, paste it on their own site and rank above you for the terms.

Google best practices say…

• Promote your site in the right ways
  • Telling other site owners
  • Telling your blog visitors you’ve made changes
  • Offline promotion
  • Google Places

That’s right. Use Google Places. Period. Oh, and – you can buy links, but you need to make sure you purchase them with the aim of getting traffic instead of PageRank, and somehow the search engine can tell the difference. Well, you can buy links if the New York Times doesn’t decide to go sniffing into your backlink profile that is – but I won’t even get into that.

Okay, so it’s a little about being attacked.

SEO is my job. It’s my passion. I’m a search nerd and coding geek. So, pardon me for a tad bit of irritation when people write about it, and it’s obvious they don’t actually practice it. When the information is wrong, I get pissy. Especially when we’re compared to drug dealers, like we are at the bottom of an NYT article.

“This is a group of people who will analyze this change, come back with a new strategy on Tuesday and be ranking by Thursday,” he said. “It’s kind of like what happens when drug dealers get busted. They don’t find new jobs. They switch corners.”

I beg your pardon? You wanna say that again?

-But whatever. I could go on – I probably did go on too long –, but the way optimization is perceived as an industry is something I feel strongly about. Rest assured, I’ll be keeping an eye on what else The Globe and Mail has to say about handling SEO with care.

My question to you is how do you feel about SEO being in the mainstream news and what these national newspapers are saying about it? Am I being too sensitive, or do you share the irritation/frustration? Share your thoughts and comments!

It’s easy to get stuck in the mental mud hole of names. For example, we market ourselves as Organic SEO copywriting and SEO specialists. With that in mind, you might look at our blog categories and think, “Well, it makes sense that SEOs would share information about optimization. – But, what would they know about branding?”

We get stuck on names, don’t we? I’ve never been a fan of titles since they really mean zero when you run your own company. We could have called ourselves the Branding, Content Development, Online Marketing, SEO, Social Media and Reputation Management Company, but it just doesn’t roll off the tongue. It has no flow. It’s hell to type… and can you image the business cards? Moving right along.

Well, today, we’re going to talk about how all this stuff ties together. After studying 4 years of communications and marketing I’m sure I can show what all these things have in common, and hopefully pass on some useful tips while we’re at it. Are you ready?

It’s All Marketing

Everything we talk about, including things like information architecture and site speed, has a part to play in marketing. Not only that, but your brand is the foundation – the starting point of it all.

The Base of the Marketing Pyramid – Your Brand

Think of it as a pyramid. Your brand is the base. It’s the base because, while all these things are what you do, your brand is what you are, in the business sense. It’s how your customers perceive your business. You can’t hire SEOs, copywriters, reputation managers, etc. and let them roam free without at least a little bit of guidance, because all these things affect your brand.

So the first layer of the marketing pyramid is your brand.

Second Layer of the Marketing Pyramid – Your Website

Your website is the second layer; a lot of things are involved in this:

• Design
• Structure
• Content
• SEO

All four can directly affect how your brand is perceived. They can directly influence the message your brand is sending out.

Alright, hold up. I was with you until the SEO. What does SEO have to do with branding?

Let’s look at all the places on page SEO touches your brand:

The Alt Attribute – To you, this may just be an SEO “trick” – a minor piece of code. For visitors with images turned off, however, this is an extra bit of information. How that information is shown -misspelled, repetitive, uninformative (for example) – can have a negative or positive impact on how people see your site, and thus, how they see your brand.

Page Titles and Descriptions – A real SEO, a hard core SEO, would know that page titles and descriptions have to be crafted. They aren’t written; they’re built. These two pieces have to:

• Carry enough relevance and key term weight to rank well
• Be written well enough to attract potential visitors’ eyes
• Entice the visitor to click through
• Carry through with the brand’s message

In short, you can’t have Key Term | Key Term | Key Term – Company Name. No matter how you write this formula, it all looks spammy. You need to incorporate other words, such as learn, read, find out – action words that cause them to act.

Anchor Text – When you have several links on a page and they all say the same thing, this can have a negative impact on how your brand is perceived. Like titles and descriptions, anchor text has to be chosen for both optimization and visitor usefulness.

These are just a few of the places on page SEO touches your brand; an in depth SEO campaign has to be carefully configured to compliment the message your brand is trying to convey.

Third Layer of the Marketing Pyramid – Content Development and Off Page SEO

The third layer isn’t so much about your site as it is about your marketing, and it includes content development and off page SEO.

Now, off page SEO has a lot to do with link building – although LB isn’t the end-all-be-all of it. With link building and content development, you still have to take in brand consideration. It’s not how many places link to you, or how many sites accept your guest posts; it’s who.

As an extreme example, don’t you think you’d gain more authority and link juice from an article on Oprah Winfrey’s site. Compare that to the questionable returns from an article marketing directory like eHow or Associated Content. In other words, whether it’s building back links or creating content, it’s not so much quantity as it is quality.

A good SEO – a true optimization specialist – may use low quality links for a massive push, but the goal are the high-quality authoritative links. They’ll work with a strong content developer to create quality articles for a hand-picked set of guest posting sites, as well.

Ummm… How does this work with branding?

The more authority these articles and links give you, the more authoritative your brand is perceived – by visitors and search engines. A bunch of crap articles on crap sites with crap links… well, crap rubs off on brands just as it does on people.

Top Layer of the Marketing Pyramid – Social and Reputation Management 

Reputation matters

If you aren’t involved in your social and reputation campaigns, shame on you. These two processes are almost synonymous, and can make or break a brand. This layer of the marketing pyramid is the absolutely public layer, where it all hangs out for the world to see.

Your social and reputation have to be managed with kid gloves. Your brand (not the SM firm or RM firm) will be interacting with the public.

Conclusion

At each point of the marketing pyramid, you should be there. This doesn’t mean watching every move; you have to trust your SEO providers, content developers, etc. to have your best interests in mind. However, you do need to check in.

It means asking, “Do you understand my brand’s message?” It means looking at the first few optimized pages and sending feedback, “Hey, I’d rather have that little arrow thing in the page title than the bar.” It means reading the articles provided by your content developer, because those articles will represent your brand. In short, it means being involved in your brand’s efforts – at least on the ground floor of each level.

If you have a small company, you’re probably doing most of this on your own. You can’t get more involved than that. So what it means for you is that, at each level, you have to check your campaigns and efforts to make sure you haven’t lost site of your brand’s message.

A company’s brand is one of the most important – if not the most – considerations, no matter what the campaign is. Once it’s tarnished, it’s really hard to get it to shine as brightly as it once did, with few exceptions. Treat yours with respect.

I’m sure some of you have ideas to share… is there something else you’d add to the marketing pyramid?

We haven’t tried to make it a secret that, among other things, we’re organic SEO content developers. As content developers, we’re always thinking of new ways to give our readers value. We hope we’re doing a good job of it!

Now, if you’re an SEO specialist dropping by to see what the competition is doing, you might want to take notes. This is good stuff, even if we do say so ourselves (and we do). You may already know it, but you might have forgotten, too.

Many of the articles we write starts with a question. Today’s question is this:

If you’re pumping out content like blogs, article, white papers, etc. all the time, do you ever stop to see what works? –And, even if you do, do you know how to tell the difference between performing and non-performing pages?

Not normal site pages, like products or buy now’s, but all the extra written content you put out. Is it really bringing in visitors? How can you narrow down what topics work best? What’s a blogger to do if you’re blogging for bucks?

Data Background for the SEO Article Archive

Since we’ll be using our own analytics for this exercise, let’s begin with a little background (this is also something you’ll have to do for your business blog).

In June 2010, the Level343 team decided to become our own client (HA! – yes, we can honestly say we’re the SEO professionals that SEO professionals go to). In other words, we took the time to layout a content strategy for the Article Archive. One of the first things we did was to set a separate area in our analytics program the tracks only the blog.

Now, we’re not going to air our dirty laundry, but let’s look at the progress over the past eight months:

• 2,409% increase in visits
• 2,526% increase in unique visitors
• 2,660% increase in pageviews
• 2,964% increase in unique pageviews
• 21.81% increase in time on site

This is excellent stuff. So what’s to be frustrated about? We’re hitting above every benchmark for sites similar to ours. What’s keeping us up at nights?

The knowledge that we could be doing better: there is always room for improvement.

Finding Content That Doesn’t Make the Grade

Follow along, if you will, as we dig to find sucky content. We’ve been writing online for quite some time now, so, you can trust when we say there’s bound to be at least one or two somewhere. Is this easy to do? No – we all have our favorite articles. We all have those blogs we finish with a, “Yes! The readers will love this!” Well, if you haven’t looked in a while, you might be unpleasantly surprised.

This is where we’re going: Google Analytics > Content > Top Content

Set your time line to include one year (or the period of time you’ve been tracking your content output). Once you’re looking at your content list you’ll need to decide what you’ll use as “high-performing” numbers – below 1,000? Below 100?

Then, click on Advanced Filter:

Advanced Filter allows you to filter pages in or out depending on a set of criteria, like so:

For this first round, we’ve set the pageviews to less than 100. This filters out all pages with pageviews of 100 or above, but we have pages showing up in the list that we don’t want to worry about. By the time the filter is created, we’ve excluded:

• Any page resulting from a search of the site
• Any category page
• Any page resulting from a visitor clicking “previous entries”
• Any page resulting from translations
• Any tag pages
• Pages with over 100 pageviews

Our finished filter looks like this:

This gives us a total of 184 articles to dig through to our heart’s content. 184 pages didn’t make the grade of 100 views or more. Our job (and your job as you follow along), is to figure out why.

Before we go further, export your file into an excel sheet, so you don’t lose the current set of information. Make sure your report is showing all the pages (or, at least, the first 500 if you have that many), by changing how many rows are shown at the bottom of the page. Then, export your file using whichever method is more convenient for you:

With this sheet saved, we move to the next step and find a page to start with.

Digging Deeper

Now, a lot of our low performing pages are from 2008 and 2009. The information may be outdated i.e. now inaccurate. To check this theory, we add the filter:

Of the 184 total pages, we have 45 that are 3 years out of date. We edit the filter for 2009, check the number, and then again for 2010 and 2011:

• 2008 – 45 pages
• 2009 – 57 pages
• 2010 – 69 pages
• 2011 – 9 pages

Because it’s most likely that the blogs from 2008 are no longer showing in the top 4 pages of the search engine index, this is where we’re going to start. It’s time to see whether we can rewrite, update and otherwise use the content, or if it’s just not worth it.

Using Bounce Rate

We still have 45 pages to choose from, so we have to narrow down a little bit more. Level343 implemented the 10 second bounce rate rule, which says, “If the visitor stayed on the page for more than 10 seconds, don’t consider it a bounce.” Because of this, we’re going to use the Bounce Rate as the “eeny, meeny, miny, moe” (click on the image for a larger view).

Our first article to work with has been identified:

New To Internet Marketing? Basics of SEO II

Repairing Sucky Content

When this article was originally written, we were awfully proud of it. However, businesses evolve, the industry evolves and our writing skills evolve. Here is where you have to be unbiased. Look at your content and compare it to what you’re putting out today. Could it be less… sucky?

With The Basics of SEO, the answer is yes. It could be:

• Updated
• Given length
• Filled with more information
• Have a stronger tone

Is it worth the repair? Oh yes – because this topic is ongoing. Therefore, we’ll rewrite, edit, tear apart and basically write a new one. Keep tuned for it!

Conclusion

No matter how pleased you are with your traffic and statistics, you could always be doing better. As you grow and evolve in your writing skills (or grow to where you can afford to hire someone with SEO copywriting skills – whichever), your old content will stand out like a sore thumb.

If you’re in marketing, SEO, or content development we would love to hear how you mine for your elusive golden nuggets. Remember: sharing great content and knowledge keeps your readers coming back. We’d love to hear your thoughts!

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.

Social Networking Goals

It’s well into 2010. By now, we are all aware of what SEO means and what it can do for your business. As a small business, especially if you have less than ten employees, you need to learn the terms, embrace social network sites and learn your market.

Just in case you’re not familiar with the term “organic SEO” we have a few articles written on the topic. In simple term it’s the process of driving traffic to a website through organic or natural means. This term is also used to differentiate it from marketing by paid inclusion PPC. The algorithms that search engines use to rank the sites change frequently; those who market their sites organically have to rely on research, analytics, collecting data, and making decisions based on the results, as well as trial and error methods.

With patience and a firm understanding of how search engines work, you can use different proven methods than give you results, in time. Organic SEO is not a marketing method guaranteed to produce immediate results. However, for a small business with a great product or service and a solid three to six month strategy, you’d be amazed what you can do with a small budget. When done with thoughtful planning, marketing analysis, surveys, and time, one can involve and integrate things like keyword research, web content development, link building, review and analysis.

With the invasion of the Internet world by social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, and the like, you have to start thinking in the bigger scheme of organic SEO. Now, with Google real time search, it has given the small business a whole new dimension. Through the micro-blogging of Twitter, video uploading of YouTube, data collection of LinkedIn, and discussion forums and photo sharing sites, opinion sharing and information sharing has widened into extents that were inconceivable a few years ago.

A small business owner may not be able to participate in all these networks all the time. Therefore, it’s best to create accounts in networks that are suited for a certain niche market. Use search tools like Google Alert and “study” their email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

See where the buzz is and engage that arena. For organic SEO purposes, securing such an identifying tag is important; with the number of people flocking to such sites, getting a unique identity is no easy job. If someone else gets the name with which you wanted to describe yourself, it may not be an easy situation. Whatever you do, don’t use numbers or gibberish. Unless, of course your company name is Level 343.

In a social media network, small business owners have to learn how to track the trajectory of the product by monitoring the buzz. This is where taking the steps or getting the help from various social networking tools can help your overall SEO. It’s a clear way to chart your success. For example if you are on Twitter then consider using tools like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, Buzzom to do some of the work for you.

Twitter seems to be the golden child – the leader in social media networks these days. But ask yourself, is it the right tool to reach your market? For organic SEO purposes, I suggest twitting a well thought out campaign. I won’t get into how you should Twitter or the right way or wrong way; we already have several articles about Twitter. Nor am I suggesting that you plug your product and spam people.

Suffice it to say, using Twitter to micro-blog and engage your potential buyers is one of the greatest rewards when used properly. Keep in mind, the ultimate goal here for “anyone” on the Internet is to buy or sell. Once you gain entry, the topic can later be slowly dressed up to make it a business tweet.

One of the great products I mentioned earlier is Hoot suite. This tool is easy to integrate into your social networking strategy. Whether you are a one-man show or an organization with more than one contributor, Hoot Suite makes it easy to manage multiple users over various Twitter accounts. It gives you great visualizations for link statistics; graphs show summaries and individual tweet statistics. Once these people have been identified, a communication has to be kept up so that the connection will not be severed. That is how unpaid or organic SEO can work for you in social networks.

The other tool I mentioned is Buzzom. This is a great tool to clean out your follower list on Twitter. Start paying attention to who you follow in order to better understand your niche market. One can Flush (Unfollow who are not following you) Grow (Grow network, follow new people) and Reciprocate (Follow your followers back) all with one click of the button. The stats allow you to make intelligent decisions based on analytics. This tool is another great way to measure and track your performance to enrich your social presence. As a paid subscriber, you can use some of their more advanced tools, like scheduling multiple tweets.

I don’t want to sound redundant, but use these tools wisely. Do not to talk only about your product. There should be large helpings of current events, trends, celebrity news etc. Try to share the product information in a way that it appears incidental to the main topic. This way, prospective customers will engage with you and share valuable information without feeling that you’re forcing the product on them.

Using tools over a period of time is a good way to connect and bind a relationship and promote your organic SEO efforts. Once you are well entrenched you can use a site like BackTweets.com to check what is being said on Twitter and whether anyone has been talking about your business or any other small business of a similar type.

Another great easy tool to use is KPMRS. With one click of the button you can see how popular your business is in different feeds and accounts across several social networking sites, from Delicious, Technorati, Stumbleupon, Twitter etc. As a matter of fact they have several great tools to use on this site.

Here is a consideration for you – with real time search, Google, and all these other tools, you can actually create a three-month social networking chart. You can follow the various tools and gauge how your campaigns are doing. If you are selling an eBook or a product in the social arenas then you need to be prepared to merge your organic SEO efforts along with your social networking efforts. Seeing these results charted out is the best to test, adjust and merge your organic SEO and social marketing efforts.

It is more or less the same process at all social networking sites. It is a process of slow entrenchment. Some other sites that can be used to track the buzz are BoardTracker.com, This is a site geared for monitoring discussion boards, and Buzzoo.net is all about Internet buzz. It tracks several visible sites to find stories that are hot right now.

In conclusion, make sure you have a strong marketing plan and stick to it. Make it work for your small business. Use all the tools available out there, and even some of the ones discussed here, to join in the conversation and start building and tracking your network for future growth.

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.

Part of an optimization specialist’s job is to pay attention to search trends.  Lately, I’ve noticed a rise in interest about organic SEO.  It seems the general public is catching on to the fact that there are two kinds: “forced” and “organic”.  What’s the difference?  What’s organic SEO all about?  Why can’t it just be optimization?  Here’s the skinny:

Forced SEO

“Forced SEO” isn’t the technical term; technically, it’s just “SEO”.  It’s cold, it’s calculating algorithms and it’s search engine based.  Forced optimization can get your site up to the top rankings in the search engines rather quickly, but the optimizer has to walk a fine line to do it.  Methodology includes:

• Paid links
• Link submission sites
• Keyword dense articles, blogs and web content
• Viral article submissions (5 articles, 50 sites)

There is nothing wrong with this type of optimization, as long as your optimizer knows what they’re doing.  It’s fairly easy to move over the edge from “white hat” to “black hat”, so careful consideration should be taken to decide a step-by-step approach for your site ranking.  As well, many links will expire after awhile and will need to be done all over again to keep your placement.

Organic SEO

Organic SEO is a kinder, gentler genie.  Many SEO professionals will explain organic optimization as “results from any search that you haven’t paid for”.  Others will give you a bit more of a technical response, “Algorithm driven results given to you by any search engine once you plug in specific keywords.”  Me, I’m biased.  I’ll tell you, “It’s the way to go.”  Methodology includes:

• Writing great, user-based content
• Offering guest blogging spots
• Paying attention to link exchange requests to get the most useful links for your readers and visitors
• Article submissions to select sites (5 articles, 1 site)
• Adding links to your site because they’re useful, rather than because they’ve linked to you.

Organic SEO may take a little longer than “forced” optimization.  However, the results are long lasting and build a steady traffic pattern.  As time goes by, with good, informative, engaging content you’ll start noticing linkbacks you didn’t request – other webmasters linking to you because they like what you have to offer their own visitors.  Eventually, if you and your optimizer do your jobs right, you won’t even have to worry about article submissions.  Visitors will come to you anyway.

In part 2 of “SEO Simplified”, we’ll cover how organic SEO works, not just what it does.