That’s because your site will probably end up listed in some search engine somewhere, without
too much time and effort from you. Elements that naturally occur on a web site — like the title of
the site, the URL, included web links, and even some of the content — will probably land you in
a search engine (unless those elements are black-hat SEO efforts, in which case the engine could
permanently exclude you). The question is where in the results will you land? Without attention
from you, that might not be as high in the rankings as you would like.Organic SEO maximizes those naturally occurring elements, building upon each element to create
a site that will naturally fall near the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs).One of the most
attractive features of organic SEO is that the methods used to achieve high SERPs rankings are of
no cost — other than the time it takes to implement these ideas.However, there is a trade-off. Achieving organic SEO can take anywhere from three to six months.
For web site owners impatient to see results from their SEO efforts, this can seem like an eternity.
But it’s worth the extra time if the budget is an issue.Achieving Organic SEO
Achieving organic SEO can take time, but it also takes targeting the right elements of your web site.
You can spend a lot of time tweaking aspects of your site, only to find that it still ranks below the
third page of search results. If your attention is focused on the right elements, however, you’ll find
that organic SEO can be a fairly effective method of achieving a higher search engine ranking.Make no mistake, however; organic SEO alone is not as effective as organic SEO combined with some
form of pay-per-clickor keyword advertising program. Though organic SEO is good, adding the extra,
more costly programs can be what you need to push your site right to the top of the SERPs.A good first step in search engine optimization is to ensure that the organic elements of your site
are as optimized as possible. Although these elements are covered in detail in future chapters, here
is a look at some of the basics.Web-site content
Web-site content is one of the most highly debated elements in search engine optimization, mostly
because many rather unethical SEO users have turned to black-hat SEO techniques, such as keyword
stuffingto try to artificially improve search engine ranking. Despite these less-than-honest approaches
to search engine optimization, however, web-site content is still an important part of any web-site
optimization strategy.The content on your site is the main draw for visitors. Whether your site sells products or simply pro-
vides information about services, what brings visitors to your site is the words on the page. Product
descriptions, articles, blog entries, and even advertisements are all scanned by spiders and crawlers as
they work to index the Web.24
Part I Understanding SEO
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