There are entire books written on SEO, including organic search engine optimization. Unfortunately, the majority of business websites have yet to implement the techniques, despite the fact that they are very effective. The search engines love good, clean SEO, but still, many people either avoid it completely, or they opt for black hat techniques that cause problems down the road.

It's a good idea to look at organic search engine optimization if you want long lasting results and to stay on the good side of the search engines. Here are three excellent methods of doing just that.

1. Article marketing is one of the most overlooked methods of building links. It's quite simple, you take articles written with your keywords and a link back to your site and submit them to a number of article directories. Not only do the directories themselves offer a link back to the site this way, but other site owners and bloggers can then use the article, with the link intact, on their own sites, increasing the number of links you have pointing at your website.

2. Videos are very popular these days and can also be used to create natural links back to your website, using your keywords as anchor text. A well done video that is designed to reach a very specific market can go viral and be spread across the internet in no time. When optimizing your videos and submitting them to websites like YouTube.com, utlizing text links in the video description is a good way to boost your SEO.

3. On site optimization is also quite important. While having plenty of great backlinks is good, the website itself also needs to contain your keywords, as well as have great content to keep visitors interested.

With organic search engine optimization, you can expect to see better search engine rankings that are easier to maintain than those obtained with black hat methods. It's well worth the extra effort.

New search ad formats for Google AdWords were recently introduced to provide a more informative and richer search result to Google AdWords researchers. New search result formats will include maps, images,  videos and more.

Some of the new ad formats include visual elements. For example search results for movie releases may display an ad with a screen capture of the movie trailer.

The AdWords team has been developing these new ad formats and testing them to provide a better ad search experience to online shoppers.

Have you ever uploaded a video to YouTube with hopes of your video attracting lots of attention and garnering enough organic search engine optimization traffic to help you earn a nice chunk of cash, but after several weeks your video doesn't seem to be attracting much attention at all?

Well Google has a solution for that now. About a year ago Google announced launched a program within AdWords called Promoted Videos as a search advertising program on YouTube. This allowed anyone who creates and uploads video content to drive viewership of their videos by targeting hundreds of millions of searches that happen on YouTube every day.

Google has been working diligently on broadening the reach of Promoted Videos by making those videos appear on Google's search results, the YouTube home page and recently across the AdSense network too.

As a result the Promoted Videos program is now driving millions of video views per week.

Google wants to make it easier for advertisers to use the medium of video to reach out to their target audience. Starting today you can buy Promoted Videos directly from within your AdWords account.

According to Google "any AdWords advertiser with video content — from a small business looking to promote a product, to a movie studio premiering a new trailer — can use Promoted Videos to make sure their videos find a larger audience."

Promoted Videos are currently available in Canada, the U.K., France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands.

Google Wave, an online, real time collaboration and communication application, is going live to approximately 100,000 beta testers today. If you have requested a beta invitation then don't expect to receive your invitation until late today according to Stephanie Hannon, co-founder of Google Wave. Stephanie tweeted at about 10:30 AM Eastern this morning that invitations would be delayed because the support staff for Google Wave is located in Sydney, Australia and they want to be awake when all of those beta testers start using Google Wave.

According to Google, a wave is equal parts conversation and document. What that means is that folks can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, videos, photos, maps and lots more.

Furthermore, a wave is shared. Any person participating can reply anywhere within the message. They can also edit the content and add participants at any point in the process too. If you as a participant come late to the party you can use a playback feature that lets you rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

Google also says that a wave is live. This means that data that you are contributing is being transmitted as you type it. People participating on the wave can have faster conversations, interact with extensions and see edits in real-time.

The application possibilities for marketing your products and services through Google Wave are not yet clear but we can reasonably assume that if Wave is a success, which is likely, then there may be some new opportunities open up for extending your reach to more prospective customers across the web with organic search engine optimization.

Video search engine optimization and marketing is a powerful medium of distributing content. Google and many other search engines are now showing video listings in their search results. Now more than ever before it's vital that you learn how to optimize your videos to rank high.

To generate traffic from your videos you need to focus on creating high quality "how-to" videos which create the need for the visitor to visit your site to get the complete solution which they are looking for. Take the time to produce good quality videos. When we talk about video quality we are referring of course to the resolution of your videos, but were also referring to the actual content of your videos. The content of your video needs to be extremely valuable and must provide a fantastic benefit to the viewer.

Analyze other videos in your market. Find what others are doing with success and emulate them without ripping them off.

YouTube.com is the dominant video engine and has the largest user base, so it's a great idea to upload your videos to YouTube.com.

To properly optimize your videos for high rankings you need to use your primary keyword or phrase in the video title. Your video title also needs to be benefit driven. You want to pique peoples interest when they read your video title, as the title will be displayed where ever your video ranks in Google or YouTube's search results. Write your main keyword phrase into the video description and ensure that your description is written with proper grammar so that it makes sense. Do not stuff your video description with keywords. Use 5 to 6 keyword phrases relevant to your video within the tags section when uploading your video to YouTube.com. If you are submitting your video to multiple video engines or video hosting websites do not use the same video title. Write completely unique titles for each place on the web that you upload your video.

Ensure that you have a clear call to action at the end of your video and incentivize people to visit your website after watching your video. Embed your domain name or website address right into the video just like you would watermark a photo.

Benefit from the YouTube.com community features, reach out to your audience through your opt-in email subscribers if you have any and ask for community support, vote it up, add a comment, Digg it, make it a favourite etc.

Link to your videos to improve their rankings, vary the anchor text using your targeted keyword phrases within the anchor text. Consider linking to your videos from articles that you've distributed across the web.

More and more site owners that are savvy about organic search engine optimization are concerned that they might get penalized accidentally because of duplicate content on their websites. If you run mirror sites, will search engines ban you? If you have listings that are similar in nature, is that an issue? What happens if you syndicate content through RSS and feeds? Will other sites be considered the "real" site and rob you of a rightful place in the search results?

Google is very concerned about content duplication. On August 12th, 2009 Greg Grothaus, a member of Google's Search Quality Team, gave a talk at Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Jose about duplicate content and hosting duplicate content on multiple domains.

Google has published a video about the talk on the Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel. We have embedded the video below for you.

Don't start out your link building campaign by acquiring incoming links too fast. That will certainly lead to Google taking notice and devaluing those links you've worked so hard to acquire.

Start by submitting to trusted web directories such as the Yahoo! Directory and to Business.com. Follow up with submissions to some of the smaller but still valued directories.

Links pointing to your website are always more important when they are within content, a part of a paragraph of text, as opposed to being placed in the footer of a page or within a lengthy bulleted list.

The anchor text of your incoming links should include a broad combination of keyword phrases and not just the keyword phrases that you are targeting to achieve rankings for. In fact, no more than 10% of the links you have incoming should be using your targeted keyword phrase as anchor text.

It's very important that incoming links to your website com from not only relevant themes and relevant web pages but that the words which surround your link also be relevant too.

And last but not least, do not just focus on building incoming links pointing to your home page, also build incoming links that point to relevant sub pages on your website too.

If you are blogging for the purpose of achieving high search engine rankings but your efforts have so far been in vain then maybe it's time you thought about why you are blogging in the first place and what needs to change about the blog writng style in which you write your blog posts?

If you are rambling on within your blog posts using scattered thoughts and not putting across clear concepts then you're likely confusing your visitors and you're not doing yourself any favours with the search engines either and perhaps you need to change blog writing styles.

Relevancy is the Key to Higher Rankings

The search engines almost always give preferential rankings to website's that present their content in a manner which is relevant to the topic or general theme of the overall website itself. If you have a blog that is primarily related to auto transport services and one afternoon you decide to upload a post about growing tomato's in your garden, then you can't very well expect your post about tomato's to be ranked very highly for keywords related to tomato's unless you are using very obscure long tail keywords in your post.

Ask yourself the following:

·         What do I love?

·         What am I really good at doing?

·         What do I have to say?

Now think about the keywords that users will type, then include them naturally in your posts:

·         Automobile Shipping

·         Motorcycle Shipping

·         Vehicle Transporting

·         Yacht/Boat Transportation

Those are all relevant to the field of automotive transport. Now you're developing a theme for your blog!

Don't forget to use ALT attributes within your images (3-4 relevant words) if you choose to use images within your blog posts. Remember that you can further maximize your search engine optimization with image and video search too by embedding both of those media formats into your blog posts.

The search engines need to crawl websites regularly to index new content and check for changes to existing content and also to make themselves aware of content that has been removed from the web. Sometimes the amount or frequency of time which the search engine robots spend on a particular website can cause that website server to experience load problems. For that reason most of the major search engines allow webmasters the ability to slow down the crawl rate to help web servers to keep up with the load.

When performing search engine optimization on your website, using this feature is not usually needed and isn't generally recommended either, but it is available should the need arise to use it. Smaller websites which do not update their content regularly will likely never need to slow down the crawl rate. They probably won't receive any benefit from using a crawl delay, because search engine robots will adjust their crawl rate to an appropriate frequency based on the content that it finds on a website each time that it visits that same website.

For large websites that have lots of web pages that are updated more frequently, they may need to be crawled more often and deeper too so that all of their content can be indexed by the search engines.

If you feel that your site needs to set a crawl delay you can do so by setting the crawl delay inside of your robots.txt file. In the robots.txt file within the generic user agent section you can add this directive as shown:

User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 1

You can only use positive, whole numbers as values. The higher the value, the less frequent your crawl rate will be. Most webmasters will want to use the lowest value possible, which is a value of 1. Never use a value of more than 10 because that will severely impair a search engine robot from effectively crawling the content of your website.

This is how crawl delay settings effect your crawl rate:

No crawl delay specified - Normal

1 - Slow

5 - Very Slow

10 - Extremely Slow

Google has a team of engineers that have been secretly working on a complete over haul to their search index. Google calls this over haul their Caffeine update. If you'd like to try out the new version of Google's index you can get a preview of the results by searching at http://www2.sandbox.google.com and see how the search results will change over the next few weeks and months.

Users won't notice much of a difference to the way that the results page looks as this update is more about rewriting the infrastructure and core indexing code beneath Google's hood, so there are not so many changes for things like ranking. Some of the search results do change though so you should try out the preview to see where your website and your competitor website's stand in the results.

Do you host a blog on your domain? If so, do you think that you are utilizing your blog in a manner that gains the maximum benefit for the most important web pages on your web site?

Think about that from a search engine optimization perspective.

When we instruct our clients to blog more efficiently there are ten actions that we want our clients to perform when they write a new blog post.

1.       Decide which web page(s) on your domain that a blog post should be supporting.

2.       Come up with an idea for an informative post that provides useful information.

3.       Write a keyword rich headline for the blog post.

4.       Write 2-3 occurrences of each keyword into the body of the post.

5.       Hyperlink one occurrence of each keyword to a web page on the web site which has been optimized for that keyword.

6.       Ensure that your post has some length to it, i.e. at least 100 words.

7.       This applies to all posts that are written for the blog - be sure to vary the length of each post so that they are not all close to the same word count as each other.

8.       If it is appropriate to do so within the blog post include a clear call to action, specifying what you want the visitor to do after reading the post.

9.       Encourage your visitors to socially bookmark your blog post. You can make this easy for them to do so by placing links on your blog post to some of the more well known social bookmarking web sites such as twitter.com, digg.com etc. If using WordPress as the blog platform there are many social bookmarking plugin's available that make this easy to implement automatically into each blog post.

10.   Be sure to tag and categorize each post appropriately with keywords relevant to the post.

The Google Webmaster Tools team have released an update. Some of the improvements include:

• Ability to block non-homepage sitelinks.
• View URL removal requests submitted by other users for sites that you own and revoke them if necessary.
• The site selector now lists all verified sites that you own and allows you to search as you type.
• More user-friendly navigation on the Google Webmaster Tools homepage. There is a much clearer differentiation between verified and unverified sites now.

Login to Google Webmaster Tools and check out these new features today!