For the uninitiated, Organic Search optimization is the process of optimizing your website to appear more frequently in organic searches onx the major search engines. Any successful website has content that speaks to the user as well as the search engines; however that was not always how it worked.
How Optimization Used to Work
In the past internet marketing companies would find specific words and phrases that they determined were related to their clients market. For example, if the client was a Chicago law firm that specialized in family law, one of the selected phrases could be, Chicago divorce lawyer. The marketing company would then use this word as much as humanly possible on the clients site. Which as you can imagine made for some pretty horrendous content, and often resulted in pages of content like this:
Generic Law Firm is one of the best Chicago divorce law firms in the area. We have an experienced team of Chicago divorce lawyers that are standing by to take your calls. Whether your Chicago divorce case is a contested or Uncontested Chicago divorce we have the right divorce lawyer in Chicago for you.
The content above is most certainly not the best, and is close to useless when it comes to a user; however, three years ago this sort of content would be the best way to create organic traffic. This content is written with the search engine in mind, and operates under the mind set of more is better. By using variations of Chicago divorce over and over, the older search engine algorithms would have determined that the clients site is relevant for that search term. Consequently whenever someone searched for Chicago divorce lawyer the clients website would appear at the top of the search results.
The Search Engine Evolution
This all makes the search engines appear quite idiotic, and honestly when they were initially conceived they did have some rather simplistic qualities. But over time they have evolved and changed. Now, some of them are capable of parsing sentences and phrases, which allow them to determine how these phrases are related, and from there determine what was the searchers intent. And all of this is then applied to the data that the search engine has gathered on all the various websites it has indexed over the years, with the goal of displaying only the websites that are related to the initial search intent. Simply put, a search engine is capable of determine whether or not a website is relevant for a certain search term based on much more than the frequency of the keyword.
Writing for People vs Writing for a Machine
With all of this in mind, when you are writing content for a website start with your user in mind. Who are they? What are they looking for? How could you help them? If you can answer all of these questions, you can write content for your website. Once you have all of the necessities covered, and your website is one that your clients would find useful the hard work begins.
Making sure that a website provides a search engine with all of the necessary information involves a certain amount of technical knowledge, and depending on the Content Management System (CMS) it could be a lot of knowledge or a little. There are the small things such as maintaining the proper title, description, and H1. And then there are the large alterations such as internal linking structure, creation and implementation of sales funnels for particular markets, and yes like in the past determining what phrases are important to your target market and how often and where those sorts of keywords should be utilized.
The goal of organic search optimization is to create a website that is useful and easy to navigate, both for the user and for the search engine. The resulting website should be seamless. The user should never suspect that there is another audience beyond themselves.