Optimize Your Website At Design Stages

By Anthony Parsons
Posted Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is simply a marketing term for the natural development of a website. Organic SEO allows a website to gain free listings within the major search engines without regular ongoing marketing costs. SEO comprises many aspects to complete a total marketing package. The difference is whether the SEO package is natural in form to comply with the search engines, or artificial in an attempt to cheat the search engines. It's no secret that every website owner wants the top position within the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP's). What is unknown to many is that artificially manipulating a website or other external elements will not allow a website see the top position for very long. Artificial manipulation is what you hear when someone says "hit or miss" optimization.

Let me quickly define professional and unprofessional. A professional is "a person having impressive competence in a particular activity" and unprofessional being "below or contrary to the standards expected in a particular profession". I have explained this to highlight the meanings of non-organic, artificial, unethical or more commonly, unprofessional SEO. Unprofessional SEO is utilising door-pages, entry-pages, cloaking, spamming (constant submissions), hidden text, tiny text, pages made with no sole purpose other than for search engines, landing pages and several other methods. A professional SEO would never need to adopt these methods to achieve high, stable rankings.

There are several key advantages and disadvantages to organic SEO, as there are with most things. Organic SEO may be costly, and it will be costly when performed by a professional. Once performed, however, your website will achieve long term stable high rankings for the one outlay, then your costs are finished. The disadvantages of organic SEO is that because it is designed to obtain completely free high ranking, it takes some time to see the results. Results average between 1 - 6 months for stable performance depending on your actual keyword phrase. You also need to allow for minor tweaking and ongoing link analysis work to be performed. A problem that can occur, and will occur for competitive keyword phrases for example; internet, computer, marketing, etc, is that other websites are constantly tweaking to out perform yours. This can lead to a monthly monitoring and updating cost as required. If your website is that competitive though, the cost is obviously well worth it.

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