You spent tons of money on designing a great website, but now no one visits except you. The answer many online and integrated marketing agencies would propose is to heavily invest in search engine optimization or SEO. Unfortunately, SEO has become a dirty word recently as Google – and other search engines – are fighting back by closing loopholes that once made it easy for a marketer to exploit for increased page rankings.

The only real answer now is to invest in organic search engine optimization. This is a back to basics approach where essentially the focus is on building a better website, with better content, that people will want to link to and read more about.

That seems easy but why isn’t everyone doing that already?

Step One to Organically Search Engine Optimize Your Website: Create a Plan!

Create a plan on what you want your site to contain and who you want to draw. For marketinghelpnet.com’s page, I knew that I wanted to draw people looking for marketing help, specifically information about integrated marketing and organic search engine optimization.

Step Two to Organically Search Engine Optimize Your Website: Create Great Content!

Create content that your intended market will want to find and read about. In my example, I created an Integrated Marketing FAQ to help people better understand what Integrated Marketing is and more importantly that it isn’t just for big corporations. Indeed, small businesses can also benefit from the concept.

In this step, make sure that you understand your audience. Are you writing for a marketing guru, or are you writing for a small business owner?

Step Three to Organically Search Engine Optimize Your Website: Organize the Content!

Tons of great information does your site no good if it isn’t well organized. Thankfully today there are a number of great back-ends such as Joomla that can help organize a site through the use of a database. Joomla also has a very good integrated search function and also several plugins that help make the URLs or web links easier for search engines to read.

For instance:

http://marketinghelpnet.com/online-marketing/creating-your-own-online-store.html

could look like this, if it wasn’t optimized:

http://marketinghelpnet.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=45&Itemid=40

Which one do you think is easier to read?

In addition to being hard to read, a search engine may actually discount dynamic content like that because they feel it may not be there as permanently as it would on a traditional, static website.

Step Four to Organically Search Engine Optimize Your Website: Create Content that People Want to Link to!

Some call this “link baiting” but I just call it common sense. Once again, remember your audience and how they will find your information. For the most part they will find your website through one of three ways 1. direct referral by a person / email / advertisement etc. 2. search engine 3. from an article they read in a magazine, online journal or messageboard.

Step 3 is what is important here. Search engines measure a site’s value in part by the number of in-bound links. If you create content that people want to link to, that will improve your page rank as well as draw visitors from that other site.

Step Five to Organically Search Engine Optimize Your Website: Don’t Give Up!

Unfortunately, like any good system, it takes time and patience to organically optimize a website. The upside is that it is ultimately much more powerful than buying links on other sites, keyword stuffing, creating tons of landing pages and other high-end tactics that only marginally work – but can anger a search engine company.

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