SEO: Search Engine Optimization Bible

Taking Advantage of Organic Keywords

We’ve already covered brief information about organic keywords. As you may remember, organic key-

words are those that appear naturally on your web site and contribute to the search engine ranking of

the page. By taking advantage of those organic keywords, you can improve your site rankings without

putting out additional budget dollars. The problem, however, is that gaining organic ranking alone

can take four to six months or longer. To help speed the time it takes to achieve good rankings, many

organizations (or individuals) will use organic keywords in addition to some type of PPC (pay per

click) or pay for inclusionservice.

To take advantage of organic keywords, you first need to know what those keywords are. One way

to find out is to us a web-site metric application, like the one that Google provides. Some of these

services track the keywords that push users to your site. When viewing the reports associated with

keywords, you can quickly see how your PPC keywords draw traffic, and also what keywords in

which you’re not investing still draw traffic.

Another way to discover what could possibly be organic keywords is to consider the words that

would be associated with your web site, product, or business name. For example, a writer might

include various keywords about the area in which she specializes, but one keyword she won’t nec-

essarily want to purchase is the word “writer,” which should be naturally occurring on the site.

The word won’t necessarily garner high traffic for you, but when that word is combined with more

specific keywords, perhaps keywords that you acquire through a PPC service, the organic words

can help to push traffic to your site. Going back to our writer example, if the writer specializes in

writing about AJAX, the word writer might be an organic keyword, and AJAX might be a keyword

that the writer bids for in a PPC service.

Now, when potential visitors use a search engine to search for AJAX writer, the writer’s site has a

better chance of being listed higher in the results rankings. Of course, by using more specific terms

related to AJAX in addition to “writer,” the chance is pretty good that the organic keyword combined

with the PPC keywords will improve search rankings. So when you consider organic keywords, think

of words that you might not be willing to spend your budget on, but that could help improve your

search rankings, either alone or when combined with keywords that you are willing to invest in.

Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing, mentioned earlier in this chapter, is the practice of loading your web pages with

keywords in an effort to artificially improve your ranking in search engine results. Depending on

the page that you’re trying to stuff, this could mean that you use a specific keyword or keyphrase a

dozen times or hundreds of times.

Temporarily, this might improve your page ranking. However, if it does, the improvement won’t last,

because when the search engine crawler examines your site, it will find the multiple keyword uses.

Because search engine crawlers use an algorithm to determine if a keyword is used a reasonable

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Part II SEO Strategies

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