How Organic SEO Affects Search Engines Result Pages (SERPs)

Organic Search Engine Optimization (OSEO) refers to the natural composition of your web pages. It includes such things as the page title, description, keywords, header tags, using bold italics to emphasize words or phrases, image ALT tags and link TITLE tags.

Search engines are constantly updating their algorithms - the equations they use to return the search results you want. They are getting better at selecting the higher quality sites, while filtering out the lower quality websites. If you keep your pages fresh and on topic with informative content, you stand a better chance of not being filtered out and pushed to the bottom of the search engine result pages.

Google is working on an experimental process called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). That is a fancy term for saying the results will be more human-like. Instead of basing the results purely on popularity, Google wants to show you results that it “thinks” you want. LSI could return some interesting results.

In the meantime, knowing how to keep your site listed high in the results during the search engine changes is extremely important. Imagine being in the top 5 results one day, and not being found the next. How devastating would that be to your business? If you rely on the search engines to deliver the bulk of your visitors, then you would lose a lot of business. Search engine rankings should only be a PART of your marketing strategy; however, SEO takes more time, research and testing to make it work in your favor.

Making sure your web pages are ready for the search engines to list you higher in the results is an important step in building your online business. The first thing you should do is make it easy for the search engines to figure out what the topic of your site or page is. Do that by using the TITLE tag in your page, which will be shown in the search results. If you do not have a TITLE tag in your page, then the H1 header tag will be shown instead.

The H1 header tag can mean the difference of several positions in the search engine results. If you use cascading style sheets (CSS) and define a header tag such as TITLE, that will not help you here because to the search engines, it is just another formatting technique. Always us the H1 tag to define the page title, which should contain the primary keywords for that page.

Your introductory paragraph should be an overview of what the page is about. It should also contain your primary keywords and relate directly to the page title and/or the H1 header tag. Keeping them similar will help reinforce each other and keep your visitors reading.

Note that your keywords in the first paragraph can also include derivatives of the primary topic to give you some flexibility in the searches for your topic. Do not deviate too far though, or you will dilute the keyword strength. For an example, read the first part of this article again to see how the first paragraph reinforces the topic title. You can use synonyms and word variations throughout the page.

Another way to strengthen the page topic is to name the file with your strongest keywords for that page. For example, this one is named Organic-SEO. The file name compliments the page title and beginning paragraph, giving it more meaning. You can do this in your blog by using the “Post Slug” option that is available in WordPress. What that does is provide a shorter name for the link in the event that you have WordPress to use the article title as a pointer in your articles.

Using bold and italics in your page to highlight certain words or phrases make them more important. The search engines will see those and give them more weight when indexing your page. Bolding an unrelated word or phrase can weaken the emphasis on the other areas of your content, so be careful to only bold those terms that will add to the strength of your topic. Italics are generally used for quoting what others have said, but may also be used for describing the meaning of a word or phrase. In that case, using italic fonts will help the overall effectiveness of your page.

These are some very basic overviews of a very broad subject. In a future article we will discuss how to choose multiple keywords that boost your search engine visibility to your articles and web pages.

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