Organic SEO

Crash Course for Marketers

@ 2009 Copyrighted Sasha Grebenyuk. All rights reserved

SEO – Search Engines Optimization is a way to let Search Engines, such as Google, Twitter, MSN, Yahoo, Ask, and others, see your website in the best possible way and treat your website higher than other sites, because of the improvements you’ve done to your site and number/quality of legitimate inbound links the site has produced so far.


Meta Tags ( Title, Description, Keywords) Contents Proper use of images Proper use of CSS 301, 401, 404 Browser Errors configuration URL Rewrite Use of data submission forms RSS & Blogging Link Building Domain Age (and how long it’s pre-paid for)


TitleTitle: Make sure your title is 70 characters, or less (including space characters). Best Practice – to duplicate your Web Page Content Title

DescriptionDescription: Your description should be 150 characters or bellow (including space characters) and should be different from one page to another

KeywordsKeywords: Please, use no more than 5-7 unique keywords/keyphrases per page, do not repeat keywords from one page to another. Make sure, your keywords are taken from your Contents

OrderOrder: The order is very important. Please, list your metatags in the order shown on this page (Title, Description, Keywords)


Make sure your contentscontents do not repeat from one page to another.

Use visuals, such as bullets, lists, numbers, cross-links to other pages of your site – to make your contentscontents more appearing to the visitors

Make sure you don’t have “wondering” HTML tags outside of the Cascadian Style Sheet document

Assign <H1></H1> Tag to your Title. Make sure, your on-page Title, matches your meta Title, and if possible, file name. Make sure you follow the subordination between your title and subtitles <h2, h3, and so on tags>

Investigate the monthly search volume across the major Search Engines for different keywords and mention them in your main contents accordingly.


Make sure your imagesimages are optimized for a website use (72-75 dpi), no more than 200kb.

Each imageimage should have an “alt” attribute, attached to it. An “alt” tag, along with the name of the imageimage file should be unique for each page. Dividers/Spacers would make an exclusion of this rule, however, it’s better, if you place them on the templates, so technically, they would not appear more than once.

Do not overload your web page with ImagesImages. A balance should be applied everywhere, except for the gallery pages.


CSSCSS is a very important element of your site these days. It’s mostly used to represent y for fonts, bullets, paragraphs, and other page attributes that would be used through out your pages. It’s your Look & Feel primary set up

Please do not use extra HTML tags on your site. It makes the life of Search Engine Robots harder and re-indexing of your site slower and less often. Rather, extend your CSSCSS to include more choices

An absence of CSSCSS file may result of lowering or totally removing your site from the major Search Engines Directories.


301 Error 301 Error Configuration is simply making sure that the Search Engine considers both, http://www.yoursite.com and http://yoursite.com as a single site and not 2 different sites, and summarize visits and inbound links for them.

401 Error 401 Error is a restricted page (access denied)

404 Error 404 Error is a simple redirection to a Home page, when a page no longer


Unless your site is 100% static, it absolutely a “must” have. Your site’s URL addresses look long and ugly. The use of “?”, “=“, “&”, and numbers confuses Search Engines. What you need is the ability to show search engine and easy and plain link, and nothing extra.

For example, such link: http://www.onecommunications.com/carriersolutions.aspx?id=1974 should be converted into such: http://www.onecommunications.com/carrier-solutions.html

The name of the page should be made of making sense words, separating by a hyphen, so instead of carriersolutions.html it should be carrier-solutions.html

Best Practice is to have your Web Page Title matching your meta title and the name of file. So, in our case above, The title and meta title should be Carrier SolutionsCarrier Solutions


Your website should consist of at least one registration formform, so your customers may interact with you properly and their information were collected and distributed without an interruption (either in the email format, or directly to a CRM, such as SalesForce.

Search Engine Robot will search your site to make sure you have such formform set up, and if it’s not true, put your site to the end of the list

Best Practice is to have more than one formform available to your visitors (e.g. through landing pages, promotions, departments), and make sure that your formform has no more than 6 required fields.


You’ve been used already to a “subscribe to our newsletter” option. Now, there is a new generation of subscribers – Hidden Gems, that immediately see all changes your made your site. The common pages to include are News, Landing Pages, Resources/Knowledge Center, Careers. Once the update occurs on the pages you specify, the RSS subscriber gets an alert, read a summary and jump back to your site. There are already some analytics tools available, who may trace your subscribers, or at least tell you the number of them

Blogging is another powerful way to attract more inbound links to your site. Make sure, your blog is a part of your domain/sub domain, and not an instance somewhere on Typepad or Word Press. If blog is a part of your site, it may also attract more visitors to your main contents.


Inbound links are very important. Search Engines see the admiration of others to your site and put you on a higher position. There are several kinds of links available (and, as number of them growing, the quality may go down a bit).

Each link to your site bring you some value. Even the links with “nofollow” attributes bring some value. Links, exchange with other pages – also bring some value. May be not the full value, but some, at least. Don’t believe me? Well, how about Press Releases? Many of them have “nofollow” attribute, and still brings top value in inbound linkage.

To be continued…


If divided by 2 categories only, then the best value in inbound links you will receive from:

◦ Press Release Distribution◦ News mark up◦ e-Books, White Papers, etc. ◦ Social networks and forums discussions◦ Blogging (no more than 3 links per permalink post

referring to your site) ◦ Cross-linking the pages of your site◦ Edu links

To be continued…


2nd category (partial value credit) of strong link building techniques would include usage of them through: ◦ Social Media Network Profiles ◦ Bookmarking sites◦ Presentations and Video networking sites ◦ Relevant Link exchange ◦ Paid inclusions (an alternative to PPC) ◦ Directories Listings/Search Engines Submissions


To buy or not to buy one-way links? That is the question. My expertise shows that if you do not buy links from “farms”; if you use at least 3-5 different title/ description/ keywords/ direct link and relevant categories, you are OK in buying links. *News & EDU sites are always relevant.

Just make sure, you do not focus on high ranking sites only – you should buy a mix of different ranking site links. You should not add up more than 600 links per month, and this should be spread out, as well. Overnight added hundreds of links raise all flags. If your domain is brand new – wait for 3 month before starting any link acquiring campaigns

Also check the site from which you are buying. If they went to Google Filter at least once – forget them. There are many others who did not.


How old is your domain? Why some people prefer to buy old domain instead of purchasing a brand new one?

The age of your domain is very important. The older it is, the better are chances to be placed on top of the organic search.

It’s also important to make sure, it’s pre-paid at least for 1 year ahead. Websites with domain prepaid for 3 month or less aren’t taking into Search Engine consideration at all, and automatically go to the end of the list.

If your brand new domain is less than 3 month old, most of the directories will not include you in their lists at all.

Postpone all your Link Building campaigns until after the 3-months period.

The only 2 things that work on a brand new domain are the PPC, and Website Optimization


Inbound Marketing [email protected]

Specialties: SEO (organic, paid), Online marketing programs, Collateral Placements, Leads

Generation, Article Marketing, Link Management/Building, Blogging, Social Media Networking, B2C low-to-high budget strategies, B2B Marketing Consulting, Database Marketing, Web performance, Web marketing strategy, web design (for optimization and usability), web marketing management, web communication, Marketing Analysis, Business Analysis, Project Management (certified), On-Demand Business Intelligence


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