In this line of work, techniques that work for someone might not work with your website. If you have a blog, it might work well with another affiliate marketing product or some other ad placement. You can go over all sorts of information, read all the tips, but soon there will be a point when you will need to pull off something that can get things going. The best part is that you do not even need to invest to start up. You can go through any reputable SEO tutorial to get the basics so you can create a site and start off with making money.

Organic SEO is simply nothing but natural SEO that is safe from all sorts of spam and cheating people do to trick search engines. I am mentioning this late just so you can have a clear idea before I can tell you the basics to start off with. Organic SEO never gets outdated remember this.

You always get what you invest; if you are into copying content then soon Google will catch you. Although you can earn money out of copied stuff on your website but it will sure be a lot harder. You will save a lot of time by not making up your own unique content but you are spending a lot more time in order to achieve a better ranking this way. Organic SEO means preparing your own unique and fresh content. Also, you need to search for a niche that is not overly flooded. Keyword research tools will help you do this and find your targeted audience. Coming up with a thin AdSense site will be stupid since people are wise today. They might end up coming up to your website but they will not stay there. Keeping them interested in your content is the main task.

Organic SEO will make sure that you do not cheat and put in your original efforts that in return will provide you with long term profits.

Photo by: Toshiyuki IMAI

Amazing as this is, there are limitations to what search engines can do. Being mechanical, sometimes the search engine software’s understanding of the content on a page can be limited. When visitors come to your site, they can see the displayed text. When search engines crawl a page however, they retrieve the raw HTML content. Using your browser to “View page source” will give you an example of how the search engines view your page.

Most HTML encoding is ignored by the search engines, which focus on the text or content between these tags. This content is how they determine the ‘unique’ content for each page on your site.

That said, there are some exceptions to this. The most obvious, is the page title. This one element does play a fairly significant factor in determining the overall ranking for your page. To visitors to your site, the page title is displayed in the blue line right at the top of the browser window, also known as the title bar. In most cases, this title tag is what is used as the title of your page when it is shown in the search engine results pages.

This is not always the case though, and some of the more common exceptions are when a site has obtained a DMOZ or Yahoo directory listing. In such cases, the search engines sometimes use the page title used in these listings instead of that available on the page. Using HTML meta tags though, you can also override the default behaviour.

Additionally, the search engines will also read any “meta keyword” tags you might have on the site. This is usually a list of keywords that you wish to use to additionally describe the page’s content, even though they may not themselves appear in the actual content as it is displayed to visitors. In the past, spammers used this tag so much, that it’s value has significantly been reduced and is now virtually negligible. Google in particular, no longer uses this tag at all in determining its rankings, while Yahoo! and Bing do seem to still include it in their analysis. As a consequence, spending a lot of time on meta keywords in not going to result in significant improvement in your site’s SERP performance.

The “meta description tag on the other hand, plays no role in your page’s SERP rankings, but is often used as the description for your page in search results. A well-crafted “meta description” which will be displayed to search engine users can therefore influence whether your users actually click on your site on the results pages.

Understanding how search engine’s see your pages can therefore help you spend your limited SEO resources wisely. Failure to do so, will have you spending a lot of time and money optimizing HTML tags that have no effect whatsoever on your SERPS.

Photo by: Helen Sotiriadis

Technically, what a search engine does, is perform an analysis of all the text (text and whole phrases) and other content that appear on the page, along with other meta data that is not normally visible to your site visitors but is on the page. A virtual map is then built from that analysis, allowing the search engine to show your page’s results when they match a search initiated by one of their users.

Technically, the map is sometimes referred to as a semantic map, and it tries to define the relationships between the words (and other content such as images, PDFs and documents) making up your page. By better understanding your page’s content, the search engines can deliver the best results to their users.

Pages with low or little semantic matches have a lower possibility of showing up in user SERPs (search engine results pages). The specific words you use, along with the overall theme for the
web page therefore play a fairly big role in how your site will perform in the search engines.

Pages are not however, just full of content. They contain other elements, such as navigational structures as well as content that may form part of your site’s template. While the search engines will not totally ignore such content, it nonetheless plays a smaller role in determining the page’s unique content and subject matter. The ‘real content’ on the page, is what the search engines will focus on though.

Given that the vast majority of web surfers are interested in an answer or information on a specific top, the unique content on a page is very important to search engines. Users are often less interested in being directed to a site where they need to carry out more searches, than they are in just getting to the right pages. As a result, navigation and other site thematic content that is important once the user has landed on your pages is far less important for SEO.

Search engines do try to judge the value of a site’s content based on how their users interact with the pages. For example, sites that bounce (users quickly return back to the search engines after following the link) users are going to be more penalized than sites with sticky pages. That said, the search engines do try and make inferences from the site’s pages.

Some questions that are considered include; Is the exact content (text in particular) available on other sites or is it unique? Is the unique content the entire article, or just a couple of sentences? Is there excessive use of the same keywords (a tactic used in the early days of SEO to try and fool search engines)?

In short, getting the right content, unique to your site, and with just the right amount of keyword usage is going to be important to any SEO effort, and cannot be ignored by anyone seriously intending to improve their site’s SEO performance.

When a user visits a search engine, and types in a search query, the search engine does two things. First, it only shows the results that are relevant and related to the originating query. Secondly, the search engine attempts to rank the many results it retrieves, in the order it perceives as most useful. While none of the major search engines have published their specific algorithms, a lot of work has been put in to try and reverse engineer these with varying success.

What can be said unequivocally though, is that the perceived importance of a site plays a large part in where the site is displayed in the SERPs. This importance is taken as a combination of the trust a site has, along with the ‘authority’ of its pages.

Relevance of content is one of the first areas any SEO effort should focus on. It is, simply put, the extent to which the content in each document or web page, matches the user’s originating query. As a general rule, a document is deemed to be more relevant if the search terms or phrases occur several times and are contained in the title or headlines. Incoming links to the page with related anchor text will also contribute to the relevance score.

The importance of getting relevance right in your SEO cannot be emphasized enough. If your page is not deemed relevant, it will not appear in SERPs at all, never mind make it to the top of the first page of results.

Google’s Page Rank was one of the pioneers of the principal of using a page’s popularity to determine its importance. The principle borrows heavily from the ‘citations’ used in academic circles and in many business documents. The general idea is that the more important and trustworthy a page is, the greater the number of other pages linking to it there will be.

So, given a number of pages that all seem equally relevant, Google’s search algorithm will use this perceived importance to rank them. In real life though, things are a bit more complicated than that, since it is quite unlikely that two pages will ever have an exactly equal relevance. It will therefore be a combination of primarily these two factors, along with more of the search engines proprietary algorithms that determine the ranking.

That said, sites without relevant content, and that do not have significant (relative to the competition) backlinks are rarely going to make it to the top of the search pages. Understanding this will be key to developing an effective SEO strategy, and also in evaluating the relative strengths and weaknesses of any new or existing website.

WWW is an acronym for “World Wide Web”. The easiest way to understand how search engines work, is to think of the internet as a web. A web not too dissimilar to a spider web. In this web, many documents are interconnected, both within a site, and also with other sites on the internet.

A page on the internet might have internal links (links contained within a specific site) as well as external links (links to pages on other websites). These links need not just be to other HTML (web) pages. Links can be to images, to PDF and other documents, to MP3 music and podcasts, and even to online video.

When a search engine craws the web, it follows these links, from one page to the next. Because of the links between the pages, the search engines crawlers are able to find virtually every publically available website and document on the internet. The computers or automated robots used by search engines for this task, are therefore referred to variously as crawlers, spiders and ‘search bots’.

Once the pages have been found, the search engines use proprietary algorithms to extract the useful content, and store it in the huge arrays of servers and hard drives they have in their data centres. All the search engines have data centres that are distributed across the globe that copies of these indexes will be stored in. This allows them to provide search across billions of pages that is nearly instantaneous, irrespective of your location on the planet.

Additionally, and then make copies of all the content they find, allowing Google for example, to provide a cached (or saved) copy of a page when the original site is not available.

The entire process is often referred to as indexing. If you think of the entire internet as one giant book (like an encyclopaedia), trying to find anything would be almost impossible without an index. Using the entries in the index, one can easily find (often multiple) references to a particular topic. The term ‘indexing’ clearly makes (almost literal) sense.

Given the sheer size of the internet, the various search engines have algorithms to determine how often they should re-index your website. While search engines need to be as up to date as possible, they need to balance this with the cost of continually retrieving copies of your website. Generally, the more often your website is update, the more frequently the search engines will crawl it.

Numerous studies have shown that search, and other online activities have a direct impact on people’s offline behaviour too. A Yahoo study in 2007 showed that search marketing had a three times the effect on in-store sales that display advertising did. In a similar study, Nielsen reported that 86% of respondents to their survey used the web to research local businesses. A similar percentage also reported that they researched products and services on the web, even if they then made subsequently made the purchase offline, or from local businesses.

Clearly, the web in general, and search in particular are playing an increasing role in affecting people’s consumption and purchasing habits. No business can afford to ignore the web, including businesses that hitherto might have not considered their product or service offerings as being saleable on the web.

As search has been playing an increasing role in the economy, a lot of effort and money have also been spent in understanding how businesses can best profit from this. The birth and subsequent growth of the SEO industry is testament to this. SEO practitioners, along with other media research firms have conducted numerous studies into how people use search engines, and the factors the affect what they subsequently click on.

Of particular interest are the many eye-tracking studies that produce maps of what screen areas users are focusing on when they use the web. Numerous studies have been conducted, and while their results vary slightly, their conclusions are quite unanimous. Users spend more time on, and click results higher up the search results, than they do on those further down.

On a typical search engine results page, the result is an ‘F-shaped’ pattern. Users’ eye movement focus first and foremost on the top results, beginning at the upper-left hand corner of the screen, and before reading horizontally. Time is spent reading the initial results horizontally, before the scanning resumes, moving vertically down the page. The further down the results page, the less time is spent reading horizontally.

In every study conducted by the search engines themselves and by independent researchers, users spent a disproportionate amount of time on the top results, and the top paid adverts than they did with subsequent ones.

Additionally few users ever proceeded beyond the first couple of results pages on all major search engines. A Jupiter Research study has revealed that

• 62% of users click on results on the first page
• 90% of clicks are within the first three pages
• 41% of users who continue their search if they do not find their desired content on the first page change their search term, instead of viewing the subsequent pages.
• 36% of users think that a company that is at the top of the searches must be top in its particular industry.

The study had a few more findings, but they all point to one undisputable fact. It pays to be at the top of search engine result pages (SERPs). Combining the right SEO strategy with your overall online marketing efforts, will ensure that you top the field where it counts.

Photo by John Wood

Search: Travelocity travel
Time: 5 min
User might have seen an advertisement for holiday packages in another medium, sometimes even offline. An advert for holidays in Cancun might have caught their eye.

Search: Cancun all inclusive holiday
Time: 15 min
User might visit 4 or five websites from the search results, getting more information on holiday packages to Cancun.

Search: xcaret
Time: 5 min
Xcaret is a well-known eco-park in the area. User wants more information on the park, and the available holiday packages.

Search: xcaret video
Time: 10 min
Increasingly a lot of video, both amateur and professional is available online. YouTube remains the most popular source of online video, including clips that are sometimes only a couple of minutes long. Clearly, the user likes what he has read about xcaret, and wants to see if the real thing (video), matches the marketing blurbs.

Search: Allegro Playacar all inclusive packages
Time: 5 min
At this point, the user is more specific in their destination search. The more focused search will lead the user to one or two websites that have more localized and specific information

Search: Occidental Grand Xcaret all inclusive resort
Time: 5 min
The user is now searching for packages to a specific resort that they have seen and identified from websites delivered by the previous search. The user is probably checking prices too.

Search: NH Riviera Cancun all inclusive
Time: 5 min
Another resort. Also possibly identified from websites in a previous search. The price comparison has begun.

Search: Cancun Riviera Maya hotels
Time: 5 min
After searching through a couple of different resorts, the user seems to have settled on this particular hotel. A booking probably results, because the next search is for

Search: Xcaret tickets
Time: 5 min

The search trial above is about an hour long. That said, all these searches might have been spread over a couple of days. A 2007 study showed that 30% of all ecommerce transactions were completed more than a day after the initial search began.

What the search trail does reveal though, is that people use search in a systematic way to solve problems, find information, and buy products and services. At each stage in the search trail above, the user interacted with various websites that provided information, and guided them to eventually book a holiday to the Xcaret eco-park.

Understanding how your potential customers might be searching, their motivations, and their needs will help you craft an effective SEO and online strategy, and not just the most expensive one. Targeting your online efforts to providing information to guide the user when they are just investigating and researching, will lead to bigger returns than just hoping to snare users when they have already made a buying decision.

Photo by Zak Milofsky

For example, a user might start their quest online with a search for ‘digital cameras’. This might then over time be refined to ‘digital cameras SLR’, before a user hones in on a particular brand or model. Finally, the user might then search for the best shop or online retailer to buy the specific model they have chosen. Clearly, an online retailer that has made the most effort in engaging the user before this purchase decision will be best placed to actually make the sale.

SEO therefore, is more than just particular search result placements. It has to include the business strategies for engaging with and communicating with potential customers, even before they might otherwise be identified as potential customers. Returning to the ‘digital cameras’ example above, one can see that it is not immediately obvious whether the user is searching with an intent to eventually buy, or just searching because they have a school project on ‘the evolution of the camera’.

The economics of the web though, make the marginal cost of website interactions so small that a business is better off optimising their SEO effort to capture, and provide information to *everyone* searching for ‘digital cameras’. Even in cases where only a very small proportion will ultimately become buying customers, the benefits usually far outweigh the additional cost.

Opportunities also exist because many users are not really sure what they are looking for themselves. For example, someone searching for train fares between two cities could well be tempted to fly instead, by a well place airline advertisement or airline website page in the search results for train fares.

Finally, despite years of effort, recent research has revealed that as many as 20% of search engine users do not always get what they are looking for. With improvements in search technology, and an increasingly tech savvy user base, this will invariably fall, but in the meantime, many opportunities exist for enlightened SEO practitioners to fill this void. As already noted, key in achieving this, will be a rigorous understanding of the motivations and needs of your target audience.

Navigational Searches
Many people use search engines because they do not remember the exact URL to a specific organisation’s website. This really is the online equivalent of using the search engines as a directory listing. For example, a user might search for “Midwest Airlines”, because they are trying to reach that site to book a flight, or get a flight schedule.

There are many opportunities for owners of businesses to optimize their sites and SEO to ensure that their results are also included in the results when a user searches for a competing business.

Transactional Queries
Many business and website owners make the mistake of just focusing on transactions that involve a monetary exchange, such as sales and payments. The truth in the new digital age though, is that transactions can take other forms, such as new account signups, requests for more information (sales contact), or even just restaurant reservations.

Examples of this type include queries such as ‘how can I pay my parking ticket online?’.

Informational Searches
These searches account for the largest quantity of searches online. Popular examples include local maps, local weather, driving directions, or something as esoteric as the weight of the heaviest man ever recorded. Included in informational searches too, are cases when users are researching alternative products, services, or solutions to a problem they might have.

Although the expectation for users performing such queries is usually nothing more than just clicking and reading, many opportunities for businesses exist. Understanding what problems your service, product or resource offerings solve for the users will help you focus your SEO efforts in ensuring that your site is displayed to users searching for relevant information.

According to research by the Penn State University, a full 80% of all search engine queries are informational. Although informational queries might not immediately translate to dollars and cents in sales, their sheer volume means that you should ignore them in your SEO efforts.

Optimizing your site and online marketing for such queries allows you to market your brand, and begin to build a relationship with your potential customers before the competition does. Given that for many people, the search for information is to allow them to compare and contrast alternatives, capturing this audience will ensure that at the very least, the benefits of your products or services are accurately represented.

1. Need
A user will initially have a need or desire for a solution (to some problem) or a piece of information (about a topic). For example, a user might be searching for a website (navigational) in order to buy a product or service (transactional), or to learn the answer to a question (informational).

2. Formulate query
Although there are a few niche search engines that allow users to search using images or sound (music), these are still so small they can safely be ignored. The vast majority of the searches conducted on the internet today are text based searches. In short, a user will type some text into a search box. The table below shows the distribution for searches in word length.

1 word :: 25.3%
2 words:: 24.9%
3 words:: 19.8%
4 words:: 13.2%
5 words::  7.5%
6 words::  4.0%
7 words::  2.2%
8 words::  1.2%

The data above are from ComScore, and while the figures from other sources differ slightly, these differences are so tiny they can be ignored. As you can see, searches based on 4 or less words account for over 80% of all searches on the internet, with an average of 2.9 words per search.

3. Evaluate
Finally, having executed the search, the user will check the results returned by the search engine. If one or more of the results seems relevant and useful, the user will typically follow the link to the originating website. If not, the user might attempt a search with a different search query. Increasingly too, many of the major search engines allow users to refine the initial results that have been delivered; some search terms might be broadened, while others narrowed.

Understanding why users search (motivations), how they search (query formulation) and how the search engines allow the interaction will make it easier to formulate and execute a successful SEO strategy. The increasing sophistication of both users and search engines means that website owners that take these considerations to heart will be far more successful than those that don’t. This is particularly true in the increasingly competitive online landscape.