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Organic search engine optimization, almost always references the practice of achieving high natural (organic) placement in a search engines result pages (SERP). The term "organic" has become the new buzz word for many search engine marketing companies to differentiate themselves from pay-per-click advertisers. Most of the modern day search engines have two (or more) result lists for end user searches. The organic listings are the algorithm based listings (often on the left hand side of the page) that the search engine derives from the billions of pages it has crawled. It is not uncommon for search engine marketing companies to encompass their techniques and practices to achieve these high rankings in their definition for organic search engine optimization.
Generally speaking, organic SEO, is a long term project and usually requires a long term investment. It is not uncommon for organic search engine optimization to take 3 months or more to start showing results. Once high ranking results are achieved they are often long lasting and will continue to produce clicks for many months more. As a result, if done correctly, organic SEO will yield a high ROI which will usually increase as time goes on, especially when compared to a pay-per-click campaign.
Wikipedia explains search engine optimization as the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it "ranks," the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
Overhauling a webpage or an entire website are not uncommon practices and are generally required to achieve the best results. Techniques such as back link building (link popularity), optimized content and title and heading tag refinement are usually part of the cornerstone of organic SEO.
Common Organic SEO Misconceptions
It is often believed that repeatedly submitting your URL to a search engine will increase the rate at which they will crawl your site. Not only is this not true, it is generally not even necessary to submit your site at all. If you have established a proper link community and have genuine link worthy content, the search engines will find your website through their natural course of action.
High density keyword inclusion in a small amount of content will yield high organic search engine results. This could not be further from the truth, often times you are penalized for keyword spamming and your entire page is ignored. Keep your content on point, and include keywords where you would include them as if you were writing the article for a magazine or other medium completely independent of the web.
Organic search engine optimization and pay-per-click adverting are mutually exclusive as far as the search engine is concerned. Spending money on a pay-per-click advertising campaign will not improve your “organic” results, as well as optimizing your pages for great organic results will not improve your pay-per-click rankings. In fact, I would recommend keeping your pay-per-click pages and your organically optimized pages separate. Pay-per-click pages are usually optimized to quickly capture a sale and generate a lead. Where as a page optimized for organic search results will generally be more informative and use a much more passive approach for generating a lead.
Information Is Key
When you are working to optimize your site, for organic search engine rankings or otherwise, keep in mind good content is key. Your end user is searching for information and they expect to find it. While a aesthetically pleasing site is generally easier on the eyes it is imperative to accompany it with easy to find and correct information. While pay-per-click type campaigns often need to focus on aesthetics and high-pressure marketing, organic optimized pages are more of an information gateway to capture a long-term visitor and ideally a long-term buyer.
Keep your information simple and to the point. Adding extraneous information for the sake of the search engine will often bloat your page, make your copy confusing, and probably not get you very many inbound links. If you are honest with your information and do your reader a service by not flooding them with keyword dense content, they will be far more likely to link to you.
The goal of your article or marketing piece should be to enhance the web and create a valuable resource for potential readers. A good organic SEO company recognizes this and honors the integrity of the site they are optimizing for. While it is possible to simply jump on the latest algorithm bandwagon and achieve decent results, pages that follow these practices are eventually identified and removed from search engines, or penalized so harshly they are almost impossible to find.
Embracing vs. Exploiting
It may seem like a pretty obvious concept, but studying and learning from the current search engine result pages is a great way to achieve high organic search results. The search engine companies are constantly refining their algorithms and search results to deliver the best possible content to their end users. In turn, by studying what the search engine company deems as highly ranked “organic” content you not only can learn how to achieve high results yourself, but as a by-product of that your content will be more in-tune with what people are searching for.
There are many “organic search engine optimization” companies out there that have no interest in working with the search engines or providing quality results for search engine users. These companies often look for loopholes or problems with search engine algorithms that allow them to achieve high organic results that are not the intended results of the search engine. This practice floods the web with poorly written content, incorrect information and frustrates searchers. Pages that are developed with these practices will be either highly penalized or removed entirely from the organic search results.
Search engines spend a great deal of money on both the combat of exploiters and research and development on improving the quality of their organic search results. Keeping this in mind will not only benefit you by increasing your rankings in the organic search results, but will also improve the quality of the web as a whole. Being honest with the search engine and keeping your content on point, and not trying to mask your intentions or mislead your visitors will provide you with the results you are looking for.
