Taking
Advantage of Organic Keywords
We’ve already covered brief information about organic
keywords. As you may remember, organic key- words are those that appear
naturally on your web site and contribute to the search engine ranking of the
page. By taking advantage of those organic keywords, you can improve your site
rankings without putting out additional budget dollars. The problem, however,
is that gaining organic ranking alone can take four to six months or longer. To
help speed the time it takes to achieve good rankings, many organizations (or
individuals) will use organic keywords in addition to some type of PPC (pay per
click) or pay for inclusion service.
To take advantage of organic keywords, you first need to
know what those keywords are. One way to find out is to us a web-site metric
application, like the one that Google provides. Some of these services track
the keywords that push users to your site. When viewing the reports associated
with keywords, you can quickly see how your PPC keywords draw traffic, and also
what keywords in which you’re not investing still draw traffic.
Another way to discover what could possibly be organic
keywords is to consider the words that would be associated with your web site,
product, or business name. For example, a writer might include various keywords
about the area in which she specializes, but one keyword she won’t nec-
essarily want to purchase is the word “writer,” which should be
naturally occurring on the site.
The word won’t necessarily garner high traffic for you, but
when that word is combined with more specific keywords, perhaps keywords that
you acquire through a PPC service, the organic words can help to push traffic
to your site. Going back to our writer example, if the writer specializes in
writing about AJAX, the word writer might be an organic keyword, and AJAX might
be a keyword that the writer bids for in a PPC service.
Now, when potential visitors use a search engine to search
for AJAX writer, the writer’s site has a better chance of being listed higher
in the results rankings. Of course, by using more specific terms related to
AJAX in addition to “writer,” the chance is pretty good that the
organic keyword combined with the PPC keywords will improve search rankings. So
when you consider organic keywords, think of words that you might not be
willing to spend your budget on, but that could help improve your search
rankings, either alone or when combined with keywords that you are willing to
invest in.
