Organic search can be a powerful source of traffic and brand awareness for your blog if thought about strategically. If you are unfamiliar with the term organic search, an official definition is:
Synonym for “Natural Search.” Traffic or search results that are a product of a Search Engine’s algorithm, rather than paid advertisements.
If your in the US, then the major search engine that you need to be most concerned with is Google, followed by Yahoo, and on a much lower level, MSN/Live. Google owns just over 60% of the market in online searches and therefore should receive the majority of your attention when it comes to rankings.
If you leveraged my tips for creating a domain name, then you will have a keyword rich website URL that is most likely highly competitive in your niche. Having the keywords in your domain is the first of many steps to obtaining rankings on the first page of Google. A second strategy is to not only get one listing on the first page, but to have 2, 3 or even all 10. Google limits the number of results to 2 per domain, so how can you go after all 10?
How to get all rankings on all 10 position on the first page of Google
I can answer the question in 2 words - Social Media. Social media/networking sites have become wildly popular over the last few years and are continuing to go more and more out of the tech savy market and into the mainstream. I’ll save going into the more in depth reasons of why you should be participating in these social sites for later, and just touch on the strategy of obtaining multiple listings in the search engines.
Each of the social sites allows you to create a profile page that contains keyword rich content. This in combination with the importance the search engines are beginning to place on social sites allows for an easy opportunity to create content on your niche topic on multiple domains and allows you to “get around” the 2 listings per domain rule.
While listings from the social sites wont send direct organic traffic to your website, you can safely bet that if your able to rank your profile pages along with your main site in the search engines that it’s going to get people’s attention and reinforce you as a dominate source of information on the topic. If you build your profile pages in a strategic manor you will also be able to gain some indirect traffic to your main site from their listings in the search engines.
One of the best examples of this that I saw recently is Darren Rowse ranking for the keyword ProBlogger on Google. Below is a screenshot:
You can see that each of these listings are all his websites and profile pages on other sites. These are just positions 1-6, but he has listings all the way through page 2 of Google. He has wisely named each of his profiles with the keyword “problogger” rather than using his name or some un meaningful handle.
Creating profile pages on multiple social networks is a great strategy for dominating the search results pages, but more importantly than creating the profiles on these sites, is the actual participation. You may be lucky to get multiple listings by just creating the profile, but you are much more likely to succeed by actively participating in each of the social networks you sign up for. The question then is, “Which sites do I target for my niche?”. That is a little bit tougher question, which I will save for a later post.
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