Organic SEO: Analytics and Technology

Most people think search engine optimization is about meta tags, keyword stuffing and anchor text. While those efforts do help improve rankings and generate traffic, they're often viewed as the only factors in an SEO campaign.

In the last few years SEO has taken on a whole new meaning in the world of internet marketing. With the emergence of Web 2.0, mobile technology and virtual worlds data for SEO purposes can now include everything from psychology, semantics and site usability to interactive elements like video, instant messaging and games. This is a very exciting time for internet marketers and hopefully search engines like Google and the highly anticipated Cuil will help us to be able to interact on the web, with eachother, in an entirely new way.

Today there are many powerful Internet marketing tools available online which vary in price from thousands of dollars to completely free. Click Tracks (no affiliation) makes an excellent product that uses the correlation between hand/mouse and eye movement to track everything a searcher does on any page of your website. It then makes a digital "heatmap" that shows how people are viewing and navigating your website and reveals tons about your page’s design, content and usability. One recent study of an affiliate website promoting Nike’s footwear showed that a high percentage of searchers were repeatedly clicking on their banner graphic. It revealed that searchers thought the banner was a link to a new Nike running shoe but got frustrated and left after attempts at clicking the image. They changed the banner to an image link and found their bounce rate for that page decreased by almost fifty percent and it was all based on this valuable data. This is just one example of the many advanced tools used today that provide unique insight into search behavior. Making these kinds of changes to your Internet marketing campaign can be costly but well worth it if there is a demonstrated ROI.

Budget constraints aside, many companies miss golden opportunities when it comes to Internet marketing and forget to focus on the basics like great content, clear communication and clean design. I’ve recently heard this mindset referred to as “functionalism” and to me it is an integral part of organic SEO and is one of the most accessible and budget friendly. This blog post, for instance, is an example of organic SEO and was designed to hopefully spark your imagination, promote my services and contribute something of value to the web.

The proliferation of this mindset of organic SEO is gaining momentum, especially as search engines like Google continue to "try" and improve their algorithms that encourage higher standards for website design, development and classification. The benefits of an organic SEO strategy have a tendency to resist changes to algorithms and build real strength in fostering an environment of innovation.