By Jeff Palmer

Search engine optimization can be broken down into two separate yet intertwined categories. Non-organic or paid search optimization and organic, or unpaid search optimization. Paid search advertising relies on purchased search phrases to drive visitors to a website, while organic search optimization focuses on developing web sites that are naturally search engine friendly and appear in unpaid or "organic" search engine results pages. (SERPS)

Successful organic optimization combines technical know-how with persuasive marketing.

Organically optimized web sites contain content that visitors find informative and relevant to their searches. Content is further optimized for search engines by incorporating relevant key phrases or words into site's literature.

Organic optimization is holistic in approach. Every aspect of a web site is analysed for it's level of search friendliness. Aspects like site's title, meta-tags, editorial copy, structure and design, usability and function are all taken into consideration. These aspects and many others are equally considered when optimizing a web site. There are, however four main points of interest:

1. Key Phrases: One of first steps in organic optimization is determining which key phrases are to be targeted. This is determined by researching which words or phrases a target audience is most likely to search for. These target keywords are then incorporated into title, description and content of a web site.

It is important to note that overuse of keywords in a web site can result in a search engine’s indexing software to considering a site as abusing or spamming search engine and can result in that site being removed from search index.

Generally a key word should appear five to eight times within a site’s editorial content and content should consist of between 200 and 400 words.

2. Site Structure Search engines are somewhat limited in way they can index a web site. Search engine robots or spiders are chiefly concerned with determining two things, what is this web site all about and where should this site show up in search engine results. Often way in which a web site is constructed can have negative results in how effective these search spiders are.