For some, organic SEO strategies is a unique blend of art and science. The technology or science behind it helps you understand and optimize your website coding. You fine tune your strategy for the Google algorithms, which aren’t always clear and watch what happens, like an experiment.

The art of search engine optimization helps you blend valuable and informative, maybe even entertaining, continent with keyword research and a keyword placement strategy.

For the rest of us, we don’t have the time to experiment with our search engine optimization. We just want to know what to optimize and how.

There’s a lot that goes into search engine optimization. If you don’t have the time or patience to experiment, there’s help.

Today I am starting a new series of posts on Breakout SEO. The below is a first in the series.

SEO Is Alive And Well

There’s been such a tendency to focus on “original, quality content” ever since Google made major changes in recent years, it’s been rumored organic SEO strategies don’t matter any more.

Everyone’s talking about the “Google Slap”, Meta tags are going out the window, and it’s the fashion to frown on any artificial SEO manipulation. (Even hiring a professional SEO company is no guarantee you won’t be penalized – in fact, depending on their methods, it may actually do more harm than good.)

This is a perfect case of people not understanding a subject properly, which unfortunately can result in their avoiding involvement in SEO through fear.

The sad part is, however – if you’re not optimizing your site and your marketing campaigns or products at all… if you’re just relying on keyword research alone… you may be leaving thousands of dollars on the internet table.

If you’re an Internet Marketer, it may not be realistic or the best use of your time to delve deeply into the technical end of organic SEO strategies – but there are some very basic techniques and tips you can apply which may increase your page rank with spectacular results.

And this is why I spend my time writing blog posts on organic SEO strategies. These posts are here to help you out with today and everyday.

What Can You Optimize?

The first thing to take note of: Your SEO should be planned before you ever write one word of HTML or set up your site.

The first thing you need to do, after deciding on your site theme and target subscriber, is find strong key phrases. Think of the key phrases as your bait: If you were deep water fishing in the Florida Keys, you’d know that sharks like “chum”, a bloody, oily mix of fish guts and pieces. It’s perfect for the sharks, and attracts them every time – much better than any other bait!

That’s perhaps a rather graphic and (if you’re not a Fishing Enthusiastic) maybe even slightly uncomplimentary way of putting it – but you probably won’t forget that image as easily as if I’d said “your key phrases have to be highly optimized to attract your niche customer”.

So the moral of my little story: Key phrases are like chum. They bring the fish of your choice to the food it likes the best. In this case – your website and online material!

Build a Website for Organic SEO Strategies

Once you’ve got all your key phrases and decided on your web site theme and format (“Will it be a static site? Will it be a blog?”) you need to build a website that is efficiently designed, with clean, well-validating code.

If you’re hiring a web designer to code it for you, make sure you hire one whose other sites you find really appealing: One who believes in validating code to World Wide Web consortium standards. Serious mistakes like not using ALT tags will adversely affect your site’s SEO appeal – and in some cases, may make Search Bots bounce out without indexing it at all.

Any designer who brushes you off on this subject probably doesn’t know how to validate – or has a big ego and enjoys creating ‘hacks’. Be wary!

Next, you must make sure each page is optimized as well as it can be, with unique, interesting content that always strives to be one step ahead of everyone else’s. (Yup, you knew that already, right?)

Finally, do include a Sitemap (but don’t worry – if that one you didn’t know, there’ll be more on that subject later in upcoming blog posts.)

Even all that isn’t enough to bring traffic flocking from the Search Engines. You need to promote your site, and create strong backlinks (without resorting to buying links, or any other artificial “black hat” SEO techniques.)

Organic SEO Strategies to Optimize Your Site

SEO is not limited to HTML coding. You can and should also optimize:

• Your Blog Posts
• Articles you plan to submit to Directories
• Your Content
• Your HTML
• Everything in between the top and bottom head tags (including the Title Tag and meta tags)
• Your images
• Your multimedia
• Social Media campaigns (they can create valuable buzz and backlinks)

Of course, how you optimize each item listed above varies.

For example, video content is generally optimized by placing keywords in the file name, title tag and then making sure to write a clear description about the video either in your code or directly in the text on your page.

Content is optimized by placing your keywords in the headline, subheadings and the first and last paragraph. However, search engine spiders also look for words that relate to your keywords, a process called Latent Semantic Indexing, and they look to see how often your keyword is used, keyword density.

You can also use local offline campaigns to add to your SEO presence – for example, submitting a press release to a local paper, with links to your site or blog. And you probably already have your website URL on your business cards and brochures.

There are a few more organic SEO strategies, however, that you may have forgotten, overlooked or just plain not known about. In our next post, we’ll take a look at the absolute basics…