Organic SEO: What is it?

Organic SEO is simply a term that means doing internet marketing or Search Engine Optimization in order to improve your rankings in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

The sweet spot for ranking your keywords is and has always been making it to page 1 for the keywords that matter to your business.  Most data available suggests that 10% or less of internet searches result in the user going past page 1 of search results.

As a business owner, this makes it critical to make it to the front page if you hope to generate significant traffic to your website.

Making your Website Relevant

As complicated as the search engines might be, they are still powered by machines. Their algorithms can only interpret what it sees in your site code.

For that reason it is important to make sure your site is optimized not only for the end user, but for the search engine spiders that crawl the web every day.

Some of the optimization will come in the form of making sure your web pages are keyword relevant. This portion of your site development will focus on making sure your meta tags are keyword rich, your page titles are keyword rich and the page itself is keyword rich.

This includes images and video as well, the spiders still rely on tags and titles to understand what a picture is or what the video on your site is about.

Another way to make sure your site is relevant is to start, and frequently update, an on site blog. By blogging about different aspects of your business you are creating user friendly content but you are also telling the search engines that your site is definitely about the industry and keywords you are trying to rank.

Be sure to make the blog fun or interesting so visitors might decide to share your content. An auto parts blog that strictly published content about their brakes or tires might not get as many shares as an auto parts blog that spoke about recent race results or a new car on the market. This is a subtle, yet interesting way to mention or introduce their product in the article, while at the same time keeping the reader interested in the subject matter.

Another way that Google measures relevance is by how user friendly your site is. Does your site take a long time to load? Then it will probably hurt your rankings. Is your site mobile friendly? If not then it will probably lose some mobile visits.

The foundation for all of your organic SEO efforts starts with your on site optimization, the fruits of that labor will come to bear once you start working on popularity.

Making your Website Popular

The next phase of your organic seo effort is to increase the popularity of your site. This is done by getting “votes” from other sites in the form of a link, or through social media shares.

This is the part that gets tricky for most people who do their own SEO. Google and other search engines have guidelines in place to teach web site owners the do’s and dont’s of link building and site promotion.

In particular, the search engines hate link spam or acquiring a large number of links through purchasing or using automated tools in order to get their business on page 1.

There are many SEO’s out there that use these tactics to rank a client and then they disappear when the clients site are dropped from search engine results.

Depending on the industry you serve there are several ways to get links in a manner that is still approved by the search engines.

Press releases about your business are a natural way to get some press and get some links on well trafficked sites. Just make sure that you are doing it for branding purposes rather than trying to move a specific keyword.

If you are a local business then getting listed in some reputable directories (including Google My Business) is an honest and effective way to let the world know you exist. Some of these directories can rank on their own for your search terms, Yelp is a great example of this.

Guest posting is another way to get your name out there and establish yourself as an authority in your industry. It is a hard to get method (if done ethically) but the resulting traffic, social sharing and possible rank improvements are well worth the effort.

There are a number of other ways to get links back to your site in an honest and ethical manner, you just have to be creative and on the lookout for new platforms and opportunities!

Creating a site for your business is just the beginning, if you want to make the most of your investment then take an hour or two everyday improving the relevance and popularity of your online real estate!