SEO (natural search)

If you’re building an effective organic ecosystem, you’ll get the most results in terms of natural search performance just by following the most accepted best practices – designing the core website with a logical structure, logical page structure, search-friendly content management system, proper keyword weighting within the content itself, and well-formed, descriptive metatags, including page titles, descriptions and keywords. Internal anchor text is also important in helping the search engine spiders understand what your site’s pages are about. Be sure to use keyword-rich phrases when linking internally.

Further, by doing things the right way, you’re also giving the user more value. When you find a site that offers precisely what you were looking for, particularly if you’ve been frustrated by visiting other sites that don’t, you feel a positive sense of accomplishment. The whole page-ranking strategy that Google has built is about creating a reputation ranking – that’s typically based on the value to the user, traffic to the site and reputation of inbound links for that particular location.

If you want to build a real Honey Pot, you want to deliver exactly the right kind of value to users (both people and bots) based on your brand. That means coming up with unbiased, valuable content that’s able to suit the market. Looking in obvious places may yield surprising results. For instance, you may find a useful manual, an offline database, or stacks of attribute rich spec sheets to build out content and value for the user. If you do that, you’re going to get unbiased, highly reputable inbound links, which are going to help improve your ranking. The best way to succeed in natural search is to offer good value and put a solid technical foundation in place.

That’s not to say you won’t need to do some ongoing optimization and monitoring, including a lot of nuances from domain aging on down the list. But, ultimately, following best practices means that a good deal of natural search performance has been baked into your organic ecosystem from the start.

It is pretty important that you begin managing search right from the start of the process. Do some keyword clouds upfront as part of brand discovery. Talk to users about your product and understand what’s really being searched for. This kind of research is invaluable. You may find that how users search – and how they think about your product or service – is very different from the way you talk about your product or service. For this reason search can actually help fine tune your messaging overall.