Paid Placement or Organic Optimization?

By Amrit Hallan

Although paid placements have their own advantages, it is organic optimization eventually you should aim for because searchers most of the times prefer clicking on links that appear naturally.

Organic optimization means optimizing web pages in such a manner that they appear in the search engine result pages without you having to pay for their placement. Although paid placements have their own advantages, it is organic optimization eventually you should aim for because searchers most of the times prefer clicking on links that appear naturally. When you website is evaluated organically the search engine algorithms take into account the following factors:

• The keyword density
• The relevancy of the content
• The source code, or the markup

Organic Optimization By Keyword Density

Some so-called SEO experts get carried away with the density of keywords and key phrases. They say that every sentence of your page should contain a mention of your keywords or key phrase. The ideal density of your keywords should be between 3-4-5 per cent depending on what you are writing.

Organic Optimization By Relevance

This is extremely important. All your organic optimization effort depends on how relevant your content is, and it is understandable too. Every search engine wants to present relevant content to its users. Relevant content means presenting the visitors exactly what they are seeking without resorting to any trickeries. The search engine companies are perpetually working to find ways to locate and index relevant content. The more relevant content you have on your website, the better are your chances of getting ranked higher.

Organic Optimization By Keeping Your Code Clean

Ideally, 90% of your page should be content and just 10% the HTML source code. Keep your code as clean as possible. Whenever you considering using bells and whistles on your website, just think, do you really need them? Are they really adding value to your website and help you gain more exposure and hence more business? If not, get rid of them. Keep your content nearer to the top of the page so that the search engine crawlers can find it quickly. Keep design and content separate by keeping all the formatting in a separate stylesheet.

Websites that are organically optimized are trusted by the search engine users because they know the websites are not there simply because they've paid. Anybody who has money can pay and get the required visibility; the cool thing is, having a website that appears on the first page on its content merit.

Paid placements can help certain websites, sure, and they can also help you for quick exposure. Organic optimization begins to show results after months of effort (it's worth it). So until your website starts showing up on its own, you can pay to get some exposure.

Copyright © 2008 Amrit Hallan
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