Organic SEO and Search Engines: What Gives?

Organic SEO is search engine optimization in its purest form: no black hat methods, no scripting, no doorway pages and NO hassle from the search engines. If done well, organic SEO is simply reacting to what search engines want. In most cases, you'll be rewarded by higher ranking in your chosen keyword field.

I say most cases, because high competition keyword fields can have literally millions of competing pages. "SEO" is an excellent example, with over 176 million pages; that's a lot of zeros. Obviously, the higher the competition, the harder it can be to rank. The key, however, is figuring out what search engines want and how to provide it.

So what do search engines want? What are they looking for? Well, regularly updated, quality content is a good start. Content popular with the Internet environment makes it to the top of the line: i.e. content shared by other websites, talked about by other people and linked. SEs decide how popular your site is by counting how many sites link to yours, the quality of the sites and the relevance of the sites (among other factors).

Note I say relevance and quality.

Linking

These sites are counted as votes of confidence. Sites linking to yours that also have high-quality votes of confidence have more weight than others. Part of your job in making your website fit for search engine consumption is checking the sites that offer you links. For example:

Your website is all about origami...

Let's say you have a link from what's called a "bad neighborhood", such as a link farm: very little content and tons of links from many different types of websites. Relevance and quality are shot.

Let's also say one of your blogs about origami has been linked to within another blog about origami. The author says something like, "I really like this origami diagram from [blog name]." "Origami diagram" is linked to your blog.

Quite simply, Google will have higher confidence in the second link example than the first. If you're offered a link exchange with one of the first types of sites, weight the benefits before accepting.

Content

Search engines use "spiders" to regularly crawl the Web. Since your site is on the Web, of course, this means they'll also be coming to see your content. One of the things they'll be looking for is updated content. Now, by updated, I mean "added". The more often you add content, the more often the spiders come back. With the Google Caffeine indexing system (faster, better, stronger - all those "er" words), changes to your site can be visible in the SERPs (search engine results pages) in a very short time.

What's the key to most organic SEO activities? Quality. Relevance. Interest. Targeted topics.

Get your website optimized. Add on-target content. Gain relevant, high-quality links. With everything you do, keep your target audience in mind. You see, what search engines really want is useful sites visitors love (and love to talk about).

Don't try to scam visitors OR search engines. If your site and content is appealing to visitors, it will - slowly but surely - become more appealing to search engines.

Gabriella Sannino Also known as M-7levels, and M-7.
For the past fifteen years Gabriella has held positions as a consultant, web developer and creative director until she decided it was time to open Level 343, an SEO and copywriting company. She fancies herself an Italian rocker, rebel and SEO geek. She loves singing in the shower and keeps a notepad next to her bed. You can read our blog here