Growing Organic SEO

The concept of Organic SEO isn’t based on environmentally friendly business operations or “green” resources that offset your carbon footprint. Organic SEO is a strategy to out smart the internet snake oil salesman. Don’t get me wrong, there are very reputable companies who can help you with how people search and find your company, but why not help yourself first?

These ideas are meant to build your rank over time by focusing on the online presence of your business and your interaction with the community within your industry—optimization without overtly attempting it.

Further, the factors that are used to rank your site are vast, some of which aren’t fully defined, so lets consider this the tip of the iceberg.

What are some of the key factors that search engines use to rank websites?

First, what is Pagerank with regards to your website?

“The rank value indicates an importance of a particular page. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it (“incoming links”). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support for that page.” – Wikipedia

What does Pagerank mean to Google? “PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.” – Google

In essence, you’re given a rank based upon how popular you are and in what circles you’re popular in and just how popular those websites are that are talking about you.

“Relevance is the word today, and that helps distinguish the quality of links. If you run a local restaurant and you get an inbound link from a site that sells Internet marketing services, do you really believe that will influence potential customers to dine at your restaurant? Probably not. But what if you got a link from a well-respected foodie blog or restaurant review columnist? Now that will likely make a lot of folks sit up and take notice. That’s really good! Search engines understand this and take this into account in their rankings.” – Bing

An important factor to keep in mind is time, or the age of your site and blog. The longer you’ve owned your registered domain, the better ranking you’ll receive.

Three easy ways for Organic SEO

Facebook – Search engines have started to “crawl” Facebook for pertinent information, especially “likes” and status updates or posts, and is factored into the search engine results page (SERP). Each post on your company’s Facebook page is helping to add to how customers search and find you. Having a strong community that follows each of your updates and gives feedback will increase the value of your page and the time you spend on it.

Google doesn’t clearly define how they factor in social media sites; however, Bing confirmed the importance of Facebook with regards to their search engine ranking.

“People ask their friends for information to help make decisions all the time. How was the food in that new restaurant, should I go see that movie in the theatre or wait till DVD, or what do you think of that hot new phone? Today Bing launches a new feature called Liked Results, which uses Facebook “like” information to help you discover new information and get more personalized results in Bing.” – Bing

Twitter – The obvious advantage of a well managed Twitter account is the ability to be “heard” by your followers. You can provide them with any number of links and generate your own source of click throughs. But beyond that, there is some serious speculation as to whether search engines currently, or will in the future, factor tweets into search results. If this is true, tweets will work in a similar manner to Facebook “likes” and posts. Therefore, the more your community participates in your conversation, the better your Organic SEO.

Blog – Google takes into account the “freshness” of pages and information, so the more often you update the better. Daily updates aren’t always an option for your company’s main web page, which is why your blog is an important tool for consistent updates with substantive material. I mention the quality of the content because this is another factor of how your rank is determined. Google is dedicated to offering the most relevant information with regards to your searches and that means you must provide quality content!

“Our goal is simple: to give users the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible,” said Gabriel Stricker, Google spokesman. “This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content — both good and bad — comes online all the time. Recently we’ve heard from our users that they want to see fewer low quality sites in our results.” – Google