So what it organic SEO?
“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimizationby Jonathon Blakeley
Unpaid that sounds good, I hear you say. It still may involve paying someone to do the SEO set-up, it is just not paying the Search Engines directly. In practice organic SEO is a combination of on and off page SEO. On page SEO is the fine tuning of HTML code, copy text, meta tags and titles to get the best on the search engines; this ensures that the search engines can find a website under certain key phrases.
Why organic?
The advantage organic SEO has is that it is not dependent upon any search engine in order to be found. If other search engines were to emerge in the future the organic SEO built into the web site is transferable to that new system. Once a website is optimised it does not need doing significantly again. It might need tweaking here and there. The other aspect of organic SEO is a link building strategy that seeks to gather more and more relevant back links from reputable sources. Website Referrals. These may be customers, friends, social websites, the more the merrier. The amount and quality of back links is a key metric used in judging your rank by search engines.
Unpaid search results may be occasional promotional tweets about your company, dropping a comment on a blog, chatting on a forum. All present opportunities to drop a back link back to your web site. But it must not be too spam like, otherwise you will violate the rules of these social sites. Less is more as always.
Organic SEO takes time
It takes time to optimise and develop a link building strategy. Optimisation is a bit like weeding, by weeding and making the soil fertile plants grow more easily. But as any gardener will tell you organic weeding is hard work and takes time. Similarly organic link building takes times and effort. Many companies choose to farm out these SEO practices, and get some other company to write blogs, and get back links on their behalf. This is fraught with dangers.
The OFT recently took action against a company (Handpicked Media), who where writing bloggs and tweets on behalf of their clients.
“The integrity of information published online is crucial so that people can make informed decisions on how to spend their money. We expect online advertising and marketing campaigns to be transparent so consumers can clearly tell when blogs, posts and microblogs have been published in return for payment or payment in kind. We expect this to include promotions for products and services as well as editorial content.”
So in essence transparency is what counts in SEO. Ethical SEO does not farm out link building. Link building is unpaid. In other words it should be performed by the client and via social network inclusion. Do not farm out content writing, by all means get help but maintain control. Define achievable goals for content creation: in other words – add new stuff regularly. Analyse back links and fine tune them to make them more relevant with helpful keywords. Contact websites that do link to you and get them to update the link to something more useful. Then wait and measure the results. Patient perserverance is the key to organic link building.
