Four Components to Search Engine Optimization for Organic Search

There are really just four main things you need to consider when optimizing your site for organic search rankings. I will list them here in what I consider to be the order of importance to Google and their search algorithms and spiders that crawl and index your site for content and structure:

1. Content. Search engines, and especially Google and its search network that Google powers (AOL, Ask, Infospace, Metacrawler and Dogpile) are looking for those sites that have the most relevant, current, unique and highest volume of HTML text that most closely matches the users search word(s) or phrase. HTML content that all spiders can crawl and index is simply THE most important organic search optimization (SEO) component. All the tricks in the world are meaningless unless you have good, helpful, targeted content that readers and users want regarding the problem they are trying to solve. Creating fresh, unique and relevant content is a never-ending process of organic search optimization. By "relevant" I mean relevant to your audience and relevant to what your site is all about. Your content must be on task with what keywords and themes your site is selling, and what your audience is looking for.
   
2. Inbound links or "backlinks" to your site from other credible sites and directories. The more authoritative, credible, popular and notable these referring sites/links are the better. This is essentially a popularity contest. Google likes to serve up sites in their search engine results pages (SERPS) that are recommend sites by other popular sites for their authority on the topic or search term.
   
3. Site Structure. Your site structure or mechanics, including design, navigation, site map, programming language, file structure, URL and architecture all contribute to how easily and deeply a spider can index your sites content, and how the main themes, topics or keywords are indexed by the spider and displayed to the user. This also includes page title tags, meta description tags, meta keyword tags, H1-H9 or header tags, and Alt-tags for images. HTML is still the only fool-proof language that all spiders can read and index, so be sure to have at least secondary navigation and a site map in HTML, as well as hyper text links within keyword body text to send the spiders deeper into your site. Check for broken links, and code that may stop a spider. Use a spider simulator to crawl your site to be sure it is spider friendly.
   
4. Distribution. This may be the third most important element simply because content distribution is what helps create inbound links. So after you have created exciting and compelling new content on your key topic, you need to spread the love all over the web. Use social media channels such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, Slideshare, Flickr and Twitter. Also use your blog, online news releases, Squidoo, and Delicious and Digg where appropriate, among many others. Add a viral marketing and bookmarking widget to every page on your site and blog such as "ShareThis" and an RSS feed. Creating and distributing content on a regular basis, while making it easy for people to share and tag your content will generate inbound links.