This post was first published on December 11, 2009. Although it has been over three years since publication SEO for beginners and organic ranking information is still the same. Internet marketing strategies have gone through the Penguin and Panda Google algorithm updates and still the contents of this post stand true. This one is worth publishing again for all you newbies.
Original Post
You use the internet frequently. You love using email. You search on Google for whatever you want to know. But do you know much about SEO, organic ranking, or Web 2.0? We will start at the beginning with some SEO for beginners. It’s just the facts ma’am.
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of promoting websites in search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Search engines frequently crawl through websites reading text and determining where exactly to place a website in the search results. They decide what comes up when you enter certain words or phrases when searching for information on the internet. SEO plays a large part in this by optimizing web pages in order to make them search engine friendly. This can result in higher positions or organic ranking in search results.
Organic Ranking
No, it’s not just for health nuts wanting to be positioned at the top of the food chain. Organic ranking is any website that is listed in the free section of search results. It is not a paid or sponsored listing. The vast majority of internet searchers click on the organic results. People generally trust organic results and they usually offer many choices. They are considered the most significant results. This is the most important part for any SEO for beginners strategy.
You might think of it like watching TV. The organic ranking is the program and the paid or sponsored lists are the commercials. Trusting what is said in the program often comes more easily than it does to a paid commercial. Many people are skeptical of the paid listings, commonly known as PPC or Pay Per Click because they know those listings are there because a company was willing to pay the big bucks to get their message in front of them.
Organic search results are based on content and keyword relevancy. That, my friends, is where the term Content Based SEO was derived. The number of inbound links from other websites also plays a role in your ranking. The amount and types of links coming to your site does make a difference.
Don’t think paying for a service that says they will post 1,000 inbound links for you will do the trick. These links need to be based in content from reputable websites that are actually about or similar to what you do or what your keywords are. This can be accomplished through article marketing, blogging, web 2.0 pages, comments on other blogs, and social media.
Web 2.0 Pages
Web 2.0 pages have been a buzz word for a few years now in the internet marketing world. Wikipedia gives one of the best definitions.
The term “Web 2.0” is commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and folksonomies. A Web 2.0 site allows its users to interact with other users or to change website content, in contrast to non-interactive websites where users are limited to the passive viewing of information that is provided to them.
Is that definition a little too gibberish and techy? To give you an idea of some important Web 2.0 pages EBizMBA listed these sites as the top 10 Web 2.0 pages. They are ranked by a combination of Inbound Links, Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank, and U.S. traffic data from Compete and Quantcast.
- YouTube.com
- Wikipedia.org
- Craigslist.org
- PhotoBucket
- Flickr
- WordPress.com
- IMDB.com
- Digg.com
- eHow.com
More SEO for Beginners to Come
This brief explanation is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many more mountains to climb. I’ll be back with more fascinating SEO for beginners explanations. I’ll delve deeper into just exactly what is content based SEO and how to make it work for you.
If you have any specific questions or topics you would like covered just comment below…and if you really like this you can share it with your buddies at the top or bottom of this post!
Need to raise your organic ranking with SEO optimized content?
Yes, I would recommend a new SEO software called LotusJump. You enter in your keywords and based on the keywords, the software generates hundreds of different tasks for you to complete to improve your seo. I think there are article tasks, content generation tasks, blog comments, q&a, social media, etc. I think they offer a free trial as well so I would recommend checking that out.