Why is Search Engine Optimization Important? Traffic!  "How To" for Natural Organic SEO that Works!

Comprehensive guide to Natural Organic Search Engine Optimization. Page 1

A white hat methods search engine optimization tutorial.

Natural Organic Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the act of designing or modifying a webpage or website in a way that makes the information about the site easily accessible by the search engines, and in a way that provides the search engines all the information they need to determine where your site should rank.

SEO is not enough, quality content is also necessary.

Unless you have quality content, and lots of it, your SEO techniques will be a waste of time and will not result in an increase in your website traffic.

For this article I will be pulling examples from a real website. The site: JohnLund.com is a site used to sell stock photos. In November of 2008 John and I rebuilt his site according to the principles in this article.  That was 6 months ago.  At that time his site was getting about 10 to 15 visitors a day.  Now he is getting over 250 unique visitors a day and climbing at a nice rate.  In another six months we expect to be getting several thousand a day.

High search engine rankings depend heavily on large quantities of quality content

Optimizing your pages is just presenting to the search engines the information about your content. Let's assume that your content is good and something people are looking for.  But that is not enough. You need many pages of content. Remember, Google is trying to think like a human. 

As a human which site would you consider more of an authority site, a 20 page site or a 200 page site.  Obviously, if the quality of the content is good, the larger site would be deemed a better site and given a higher ranking. In reality the smaller site may be better, but Google is not yet as bright as a typical human being. Natural organic search engine optimization is needed to help Google out.

There is another reason for a large amount of content, and that is it provides you with more opportunities to optimize pages for different sets of keyword phrases.  Every single page on your website should be optimized for one or two keyword phrases. Every page is a landing page and an opportunity to capture more visitors. Every page will provide more opportunities for those long-tailed keyword phrases.

Keyword research is the first step in your organic optimization efforts to get increased traffic

This can't be emphasized enough...thorough keyword research is absolutely critical.  If you target the wrong keyword phrases you may get a # 1 position on the results page, but you won't get any traffic!  With one of the many available keyword research tools you can find out what phrases are being used in the search engines to find material such as yours, and target those organic phrases.

Pay attention to the long-tailed keyword phrases!  Make sure your body copy has some of those extra keyword modifiers sprinkled around in strategic locations.  Long tailed keyword phrases provide more than 50% of the traffic to all of my websites.

Long-tailed keyword phrases that match your content are better than single or short keyword phrases, because with better targeting you are more likely to make that all important conversion.  If you have a web site selling stock photographs, and your visitor has typed in "stock photo", you aren't really sure what the visitor is searching for.

Your visitor might be looking for stock photos of monkeys or trains, or even stock cars!  But if the visitor has found you through a long tailed keyword phrase such as "stock photos of an elephant", and it matches your content, then it is far more likely that visitor will find what he is looking for. Long-tailed keywords are an important part of your natural organic search engine optimization.

Seo tutorial Page 2