Understanding Organic SEO

All this talk about planning for SEO is great, but what about organic SEO. You don’t have to put any

efforts into that, do you?

Don’t go foolin’ yourself. Organic SEO is just as much work as any other type of SEO. It’s just a

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little different method of creating a site optimized for search ranking, without having to implement

any new technologies or spend a lot of time submitting your site to different primary and

secondary search engines. And really, the distinction here is a very general one. Only SEO purists

consider “real SEO” as being strictly organic — meaning you use no fee-based services whatever.

Most people are happy with “just plain SEO,” which usually means a combination of organic and

fee-based. It’s best if you just think of SEO as just SEO; then you don’t have to worry about distinctions

that aren’t really important in optimizing your web site.

The definitions of organic SEO vary a little, depending on whom you talk to. Some SEO experts think

it’s all about optimizing the content of your web site to catch the attention of the crawlers and spiders

that index sites. Others think it’s the number of quality links you can generate on your site. But in

truth, organic SEO is a combination of those and other elements, such as site tagging, that will naturally

place your web site in search engine rankings. How high in those rankings depends on how well

you design your site.

But before you go thinking that organic SEO is just the solution you’ve been looking for, take a step

back. What organic SEO is not is an easy way to land in a search engine. Basically, if you put a web

site online and spend a little time getting it ready for the world to see, you will have probably

achieved some measure of organic SEO without really trying.

That’s because your site will probably end up listed in some search engine somewhere, without

too much time and effort from you. Elements that naturally occur on a web site — like the title of

the site, the URL, included web links, and even some of the content — will probably land you in

a search engine (unless those elements are black-hat SEO efforts, in which case the engine could

permanently exclude you). The question is where in the results will you land? Without attention

from you, that might not be as high in the rankings as you would like.

Organic SEO maximizes those naturally occurring elements, building upon each element to create

a site that will naturally fall near the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). One of the most

attractive features of organic SEO is that the methods used to achieve high SERPs rankings are of

no cost — other than the time it takes to implement these ideas.

However, there is a trade-off. Achieving organic SEO can take anywhere from three to six months.

For web site owners impatient to see results from their SEO efforts, this can seem like an eternity.

But it’s worth the extra time if the budget is an issue.
Jerri L. Ledford