NATURAL SEARCH STRATEGY
Your website is your "place of business" on the Internet. Like places of business out in the brick-and-mortar world, the success of your online business is determined by three things; location, location, and location. Out in the real world, that means a high-visibility location on a main thoroughfare. On the Internet, it means location in the top search results of search engines.
There are basically two kinds of search results that a search engine returns in
response to a query by a user; paid and natural (organic). The paid advertising
results displayed by the search engines are located at the top of the page and on the right-hand side of the page. The natural or organic search results are located just below the paid advertisements on the top of the page and to the left.
Research proves that in 60.5% of searches, users clicked on a natural (or “organic” or “algorithmic”) search result, and only 39.5% clicked on a paid search advertisement. That alone tells you that it pays to incorporate natural search in your affiliate marketing efforts.
The search engines use a mysterious algorithm to determine the order in which the natural search results are displayed. Search engines have spiders, or bots, that crawl the web looking at websites and determining their relevance to certain
keywords, and this is the information used to determine placement in search results. The idea is to get your website listed as high as possible in the natural search results displayed by the search engines for a user who types your keywords into the search box.
Natural Search and SEO
Natural search engine marketing strategy requires you to optimize your site to attract the search engine spiders, and there have been volumes written on search engine optimization (SEO). Here we’ll discuss the relationship between SEO and a natural search marketing strategy.
I’m a big fan of "free." I’m pretty crazy about "low-cost," too, and that’s what a natural search strategy is. It’s free or mostly free SEO techniques that you can use to attract the search engine spiders; this gets a high ranking in natural search results and thus generates website traffic at little or no cost.
Traffic results come much more slowly using natural search techniques, and they are certainly more "labor intensive" than paid advertising. On the other hand, natural search techniques cost a lot less than paid search (PPC) advertising, and that’s
important when you have a limited advertising budget. Here are a few natural search marketing strategies:
Research and Choose Keywords Wisely
Keywords are spider bait. Keywords and key phrases are what spiders are searching for when they crawl the web. Keyword research is absolutely essential for a natural search engine marketing strategy to work.
You need to know how your target market uses language when they are searching for products that are related to the topic of your website. You want to choose and use keywords and phrases that your target market uses. Just some (uncommon) common sense is the first step. Think about the words that you use, that your friends use, that your parents use when searching for a specific product. Those are keywords.
There are also several really great keyword tools available. Make use of them and choose the best keywords and key phrases that you can.
These keywords and key phrases need to be used on your website. The best one needs to be in your heading. They need to be in your meta tags. They need to be used at least once (twice is better) in the opening sentence of the opening paragraph on your website.
It’s important that keywords appear in every paragraph on every page of your website. You can find tons of material on the Internet about the use of keywords and phrases.
*NOTE: Overdoing the use of keywords is considered "keyword stuffing" by search engine spiders. It won’t get your site indexed, and it might get your site banished from search results.
Submit Your Site to Directories
There are hundreds of directories, but there are four major directories on the Internet, and the visibility of your website in these human-edited directory databases (Yahoo!, the Open Directory, LookSmart, and Business.com) is an important factor in natural search strategy.
Each directory has its own "rules" that you will need to read and follow, and all of them refuse to accept automatically enerated submissions. You must make each submission by hand.
Submit Your Site to Search Engines
Start with Google and Yahoo and work your way down. Submit to as many search engines as possible. Again, each search engine has its own "rules," and you need to abide by them. Automatic submissions are not allowed. These also must be done
"by hand".
Enhance Your Website Content
Constantly updated, keyword-rich, and relevant content attracts search engine spiders. The more often you update the content of your website, the more often the search engine spiders will visit. That means that your pages will be indexed more quickly and that you will get a higher page rank in natural search results.
High-quality, relevant content copy that is keyword rich (without being overly so) which is formatted in a user-friendly manner and is updated very frequently, is a major factor in a natural search strategy.
* NOTE: User-friendly formatting means that only short sentences and short blocks of copy (paragraphs) are used. Bullet points are considered "user-friendly" formatting.
Keep an Eye on the Competition
A website doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Your website is only one of a great many on the Internet that are angling for the same group of consumers. You need to know what your competitors are doing and how they are doing it in order to keep your website competitive.
Take note of the keywords that your competitor is using and how he is using them. Pay attention to the layout of his website as compared to the layout of your own website. If he’s doing something better than you are doing it, then take what he is doing, modify it, and use it yourself.
Your website needs to be better than your biggest competitor’s website. The way to make that determination is to take the time and put forth the effort to visit your competitors’ websites.
Write and Submit Articles to Article Banks
This is a tried-and-true technique for attracting traffic to your website at no cost to you. It is also one of the best methods for getting others to help you get higher rankings in natural search results.
The cost of writing and submitting articles to article banks in monetary terms is nothing, zero, nada. In terms of time, the cost can be high. It takes time and effort to write articles that others deem good enough to use on their websites, and submitting articles to article banks is also time consuming. But when your articles are used on other websites, the link to your website is included in the resource box, and search engine spiders really, REALLY like that.
There have been volumes of material written about writing articles and submitting them to article banks. In a nutshell:
• The article must be RELEVANT.
• The article must be keyword rich.
• The article must have an attention getting title that includes a keyword.
• The article must have a first line that causes the reader to want to continue reading and should also contain a keyword.
• The article should be about 400 words long.
• The spelling and grammar must be impeccable.
The resource box must contain your name and a link to your website.
Join and Post to Relevant Blogs and Forums
Internet marketers have known for years that their best customer prospects hang out on blogs and forums that are related to the topic of their own websites.
These blogs and forums do not allow blatant advertising, but you can include a link to your own website in your sig tag. Each time you post to a blog or forum above your sig tag, you are giving the search engine spiders one more link to count. You
are giving them one more reason to place you higher in the natural search results. (You’re also advertising to a pool of your best prospects if your posts are well thought out and well written.)
Conclusion
It’s true that you can use only natural search engine marketing strategy, but it is best to use a combination of both paid and natural search engine marketing techniques.
Here’s how natural and paid search strategies stack up:
• For position on search results page, the advantage goes to natural search.
• For results speed, the advantage goes to paid search.
• For user trust level, the advantage goes to natural search
• For difficulty in obtaining a top position, the advantage goes to paid search
(if you’re willing and able to pay for it.)
For cost, natural search wins going away!
There are advantages and disadvantages to both paid search strategy and natural search strategy, but when they are used together, you get the best of both worlds.
About the Author
Kathy Jackson is a Texas Rancher and freelance writer. She is also a contributing author for several farm and ranch publications. Internet marketing is one of Kathy’s burning interests and she is just “tickled pink” to write for AC Magazine and Anik Singal, her marketing hero. On the Affiliate Classroom Blog (http://blog.affiliateclassroom.com/), you will find several articles by Kathy on various aspects of affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Program information Related
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NATURAL SEARCH STRATEGY
NATURAL SEARCH STRATEGY
Your website is your "place of business" on the Internet. Like places of business out in the brick-and-mortar world, the success of your online business is determined by three things; location, location, and location. Out in the real world, that means a high-visibility location on a main thoroughfare. On the Internet, it means location in the top search results of search engines.
There are basically two kinds of search results that a search engine returns in
response to a query by a user; paid and natural (organic). The paid advertising
results displayed by the search engines are located at the top of the page and on the right-hand side of the page. The natural or organic search results are located just below the paid advertisements on the top of the page and to the left.
Research proves that in 60.5% of searches, users clicked on a natural (or “organic” or “algorithmic”) search result, and only 39.5% clicked on a paid search advertisement. That alone tells you that it pays to incorporate natural search in your affiliate marketing efforts.
The search engines use a mysterious algorithm to determine the order in which the natural search results are displayed. Search engines have spiders, or bots, that crawl the web looking at websites and determining their relevance to certain
keywords, and this is the information used to determine placement in search results. The idea is to get your website listed as high as possible in the natural search results displayed by the search engines for a user who types your keywords into the search box.
Natural Search and SEO
Natural search engine marketing strategy requires you to optimize your site to attract the search engine spiders, and there have been volumes written on search engine optimization (SEO). Here we’ll discuss the relationship between SEO and a natural search marketing strategy.
I’m a big fan of "free." I’m pretty crazy about "low-cost," too, and that’s what a natural search strategy is. It’s free or mostly free SEO techniques that you can use to attract the search engine spiders; this gets a high ranking in natural search results and thus generates website traffic at little or no cost.
Traffic results come much more slowly using natural search techniques, and they are certainly more "labor intensive" than paid advertising. On the other hand, natural search techniques cost a lot less than paid search (PPC) advertising, and that’s
important when you have a limited advertising budget. Here are a few natural search marketing strategies:
Research and Choose Keywords Wisely
Keywords are spider bait. Keywords and key phrases are what spiders are searching for when they crawl the web. Keyword research is absolutely essential for a natural search engine marketing strategy to work.
You need to know how your target market uses language when they are searching for products that are related to the topic of your website. You want to choose and use keywords and phrases that your target market uses. Just some (uncommon) common sense is the first step. Think about the words that you use, that your friends use, that your parents use when searching for a specific product. Those are keywords.
There are also several really great keyword tools available. Make use of them and choose the best keywords and key phrases that you can.
These keywords and key phrases need to be used on your website. The best one needs to be in your heading. They need to be in your meta tags. They need to be used at least once (twice is better) in the opening sentence of the opening paragraph on your website.
It’s important that keywords appear in every paragraph on every page of your website. You can find tons of material on the Internet about the use of keywords and phrases.
*NOTE: Overdoing the use of keywords is considered "keyword stuffing" by search engine spiders. It won’t get your site indexed, and it might get your site banished from search results.
Submit Your Site to Directories
There are hundreds of directories, but there are four major directories on the Internet, and the visibility of your website in these human-edited directory databases (Yahoo!, the Open Directory, LookSmart, and Business.com) is an important factor in natural search strategy.
Each directory has its own "rules" that you will need to read and follow, and all of them refuse to accept automatically enerated submissions. You must make each submission by hand.
Submit Your Site to Search Engines
Start with Google and Yahoo and work your way down. Submit to as many search engines as possible. Again, each search engine has its own "rules," and you need to abide by them. Automatic submissions are not allowed. These also must be done
"by hand".
Enhance Your Website Content
Constantly updated, keyword-rich, and relevant content attracts search engine spiders. The more often you update the content of your website, the more often the search engine spiders will visit. That means that your pages will be indexed more quickly and that you will get a higher page rank in natural search results.
High-quality, relevant content copy that is keyword rich (without being overly so) which is formatted in a user-friendly manner and is updated very frequently, is a major factor in a natural search strategy.
* NOTE: User-friendly formatting means that only short sentences and short blocks of copy (paragraphs) are used. Bullet points are considered "user-friendly" formatting.
Keep an Eye on the Competition
A website doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Your website is only one of a great many on the Internet that are angling for the same group of consumers. You need to know what your competitors are doing and how they are doing it in order to keep your website competitive.
Take note of the keywords that your competitor is using and how he is using them. Pay attention to the layout of his website as compared to the layout of your own website. If he’s doing something better than you are doing it, then take what he is doing, modify it, and use it yourself.
Your website needs to be better than your biggest competitor’s website. The way to make that determination is to take the time and put forth the effort to visit your competitors’ websites.
Write and Submit Articles to Article Banks
This is a tried-and-true technique for attracting traffic to your website at no cost to you. It is also one of the best methods for getting others to help you get higher rankings in natural search results.
The cost of writing and submitting articles to article banks in monetary terms is nothing, zero, nada. In terms of time, the cost can be high. It takes time and effort to write articles that others deem good enough to use on their websites, and submitting articles to article banks is also time consuming. But when your articles are used on other websites, the link to your website is included in the resource box, and search engine spiders really, REALLY like that.
There have been volumes of material written about writing articles and submitting them to article banks. In a nutshell:
• The article must be RELEVANT.
• The article must be keyword rich.
• The article must have an attention getting title that includes a keyword.
• The article must have a first line that causes the reader to want to continue reading and should also contain a keyword.
• The article should be about 400 words long.
• The spelling and grammar must be impeccable.
The resource box must contain your name and a link to your website.
Join and Post to Relevant Blogs and Forums
Internet marketers have known for years that their best customer prospects hang out on blogs and forums that are related to the topic of their own websites.
These blogs and forums do not allow blatant advertising, but you can include a link to your own website in your sig tag. Each time you post to a blog or forum above your sig tag, you are giving the search engine spiders one more link to count. You
are giving them one more reason to place you higher in the natural search results. (You’re also advertising to a pool of your best prospects if your posts are well thought out and well written.)
Conclusion
It’s true that you can use only natural search engine marketing strategy, but it is best to use a combination of both paid and natural search engine marketing techniques.
Here’s how natural and paid search strategies stack up:
• For position on search results page, the advantage goes to natural search.
• For results speed, the advantage goes to paid search.
• For user trust level, the advantage goes to natural search
• For difficulty in obtaining a top position, the advantage goes to paid search
(if you’re willing and able to pay for it.)
For cost, natural search wins going away!
There are advantages and disadvantages to both paid search strategy and natural search strategy, but when they are used together, you get the best of both worlds.
About the Author
Kathy Jackson is a Texas Rancher and freelance writer. She is also a contributing author for several farm and ranch publications. Internet marketing is one of Kathy’s burning interests and she is just “tickled pink” to write for AC Magazine and Anik Singal, her marketing hero. On the Affiliate Classroom Blog (http://blog.affiliateclassroom.com/), you will find several articles by Kathy on various aspects of affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Program information Related