Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – What Does Organic SEO Mean?

A common practice among SEO consultants is
to ‘optimize’ your site for the top search engine rankings. Optimizing for the
top search engine rankings is simply doing what you did in the organic search
ranking process. You optimize your site based on keywords and content. In other
words, search engine optimization is just a re-hash of what you already did in
the organic search ranking process. SEO is an acronym for search engine
rankings, and this is the exact method of optimization used by those who wish
to be ranked highly.

The CTR, or click-through rate, is the
actual number of times that a visitor clicks through your link. Ideally, you
want your site to rank within the top twenty rankings for each keyword that you
target. To measure this number, you simply divide the number of clicks by the
number of keyword phrases (keywords) that you have on your site. If you have a
site that has ten thousand keyword phrases, you would expect that one tenth of
a percent of all web surfers would click on your link.

There are many different ways to measure
your CTR. Most marketers will use internal CTRs (customer data feeds) and
external CTRs (from third party websites that offer click-through rates).
External CTRs are the best, because you can determine not only how many people
saw your ad, but also how many of them clicked on your link. Internal CTRs are
a bit more difficult to use because you are measuring the performance of your
keyword phrase in the search term itself.

For example, if your main keyword is dog,
you would want to rank specifically for dog training. So, let’s say that dog
training is number one in the search term dog, so when someone searches
“dog training” you should be ranked very high on the first page of
the search engine result page. However, if your keyword was “How to train
a dog”, then you would want to rank at the bottom of the page, so that
people searching for more specific information on how to train a dog don’t see
your advertisement. 

There are many ways to calculate the CTR (comparison of
internal and external CTR), and some of them are a little bit more complicated
than others, such as averaging the open rates of a keyword against the open
rates of an external keyword.

As stated above, the benefits of a good
organic CTR (click through rate) are that you know your CTR is giving you
results, however the downside is that you have to pay for these clicks. Pay per
click advertising, like all advertising, means you have to either pay a lot up
front for each click or pay each time the advertisement is displayed. But both
of these options have a downfall in that you are losing potential traffic for
your website without even realizing it and without realizing this you may be
missing out on an opportunity to drive sales to your site and gain your ranking
back up into the search engine rankings!

Therefore, when considering which form of
search engine optimization method to use for your business website, you need to
carefully consider both the positives and negatives of each. Organic SEO is the
best way to start because it is free, and there are many tools to help you with
getting started and maintaining your ranking in the search engines. Organic
search engine optimization does take some time to achieve results, but it will
definitely worth the time and effort put into it. While organic SEO is a
long-term project, if done properly, your site can gain in the rankings
organically over time, and your page rank can begin to rise naturally.