Organic SEO is an often overlooked part of online marketing. Organic SEO involves optimising your website so that it appears at the top of the search results for specific keywords. It remains a very useful and cost effective marketing technique.
Organic SEO Basics
Organic or natural search results are the ones that appear underneath the ads in Google and other search engines. If a user clicks on your link in the organic search results, then you do not have to pay for that click. Organic SEO is extremely valuable because a well optimised strategy can enable a website to stay at the top of the SERPs for a long time, meaning that you will continue to get heavy traffic from your organic search rankings. With paid search, the moment you stop paying, the clicks will stop coming.
There are many optimisation techniques that can improve your rankings in the search engines. The foundations of organic SEO are on-page optimisation, semantic keyword relevancy, authoritative link building, and content creation. These techniques have been an important part of SEO since the early days of the internet and are more important today than ever before thanks to Google's Hummingbird update. With Hummingbird, Google reworked their ranking algorithm to emphasise high-quality, user-focused content and penalise websites with keyword-stuffed content and over-optimised, thin content designs.
Quality Over Quantity
Link building is an important, but often misunderstood part of organic SEO. Many webmasters make the mistake of assuming that having a high number of links is the only thing that matters. This is not the case. The quality and relevance of the links are far more important than the number of links, and having a high number of bad links could actually hamper your SEO efforts.
If you are planning a link-building campaign, focus on acquiring links from blogs and websites that are directly related to your niche. Do not go on a massive link-building campaign in which you acquire a large number of links in a short time. Instead, set aside some time each week or month to engage in blogger outreach, submit guest blog posts to popular blogs and news websites, do some marketing based on high-quality press releases and build a small number of links each time. A steady flow of links from authoritative sources will serve you much better from an SEO point of view and will also help you to stay in the limelight in your niche.
Putting Community First
Organic SEO is just one part of online marketing, but it is something that will benefit from most other marketing efforts. Instead of trying to fool the search engines into ranking you well, focus on social media, community engagement and blogger outreach, as well as giving your consumers and website visitors the information they want. All of these things will have the side-effect of improving your online footprint and will help you to rank better in the search engines.