Using your web site

As noted in the last section, the types of organic marketing boil down to the following three things:

1. People visiting your site from search results
2. People being referred to your site from your content on other sites
3. People being referred to your site by links from other people and/or other word of mouth methods

Of these three methods, you have a good amount of control over the first two and typically little or no control over the last method unless you start paying people to place links on their sites.

Understanding what things search engines look for when deciding what to display (and what order to display things in) can help significantly in getting your pages to show up in the top of search results.

The goal of a search engine is to provide relevant content that people are looking for. Because of this, the best search engine companies try to build their search engines to look for what people look for and display the results that appear to match the best.

Currently, the major search engines look primarily at two factors:

1. The quality and number of backlinks pointing you your site from other web sites
2. The information displayed on your pages

At this point in time, more weight seems to be given to the quantity and quality of back links ( links from other sites which point to your site ), commonly called off-page factors, than to the composition of your pages.

However, if all other things are relatively equal, the composition and content of your page will generally decide which page gets placed higher in search results. These components are typically referred to as on-page factors for ranking.

For detailed information on both backlinks and page composition, see the resource box below.

Resources:

• The Nature of Quality Backlinks
• How Page Rank is Passed to Other Web Sites
• The Composition of a Search Optimized Web Page

If you followed the provided instructions on this site, then you likely made some tweaks to your site and installed at least one plugin geared towards optimizing your individual pages while doing so.

If not, but you run a WordPress based site, be sure to check out the following information:

• Altering H1 and H2 display for SEO
• Platinum SEO

By altering your theme to have post and page titles on individual pages display with H1 instead of H2 tags, you give more weight to your individual pages. By default, most WordPress themes use H2 tags for individual post and page titles and H1 tags for your site name. That might be fine for ToysRUs or Costco, but if you lack their brand recognition, then chances are good that you don’t want to be telling search engine robots that the most important thing on your web site is your site name.

The Platinum SEO pack lets you override the title displayed in the head of your webpage, specify a meta description and meta keywords for each individual page, and set instructions for search robots on a page by page basis. As you will see once we get into Information Marketing, all of these are excellent things to be able to do.