Everyone wants Organic Web Traffic. The real question is HOW do you do it?
Let's get a little background to our experience in the searching history before we jump right in. It will help to see that things used to be simple and now, well, not so much- from one company’s perspective. Your may relate to this.
Back in the day when the web first started, I rushed out to Office Depot and bought Microsoft's Frontpage and quickly ate it up, designed some pages with forms and contacted their recommended hosting provider and WHALA*POOOF* a web presence was started. It was pretty straight forward. I was loyal and even upgraded to the 2003 version. I had some success with this presence and method and everything was great. Yahoo was the number one search engine and I had good rankings with them.
Then along came a little company called Goto.com. These folks had a really neat idea to pay for ads, and they would put you on search terms for them. We all know how that works now. But then it was pretty small and we were paying pennies for ads! Cool! But our competitors eventually found out about that too, so it was like MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) if you haven’t heard what it is, it’s an arms race. Each side builds nukes so that they keep the enemy at bay. Our penny ads went to a dime, then to quarters and eventually as it is now- dollars per click on certain terms. We spent much time searching for little used phrases and let the big ones go as we couldn’t afford it.
At this point, my Frontpage site was getting huge from pictures and new pages that we had made. It was kind of like our garages that you start packing stuff into until you can’t even park your car in it. Then I started reading about coding and how it needed to be clean and how search engines penalized sites that were not ‘up to code’ and that was a concern to me. After talking with my hosting site about the Frontpage extensions and how they had a dedicated server for just Frontpage, and how it was not being upgraded by Microsoft, the decision was made to jump to another tool to work on our site. So this year (2008) we made the transition to using Dreamweaver as it uses cleaner code and has other options that Frontpage did not use. Has it been easy? No. Was it worth it? Yes. If you are using Frontpage, dump it. Learn CSS. We did and have never looked back.
The ability to manipulate the code and where it is placed on pages is the critical part of search engine ranking, anyhow according to how Google sees it. Our pages rank very well in Google. With Yahoo and MSN, these are different we don’t rank to well with them. Some pages we do, others we stink. We just concentrate on Google anyhow. If we get traffic from the others, that’s just the icing on the cake so to speak.
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