Organic SEO is one of the latest in search engine optimization buzzwords. It might be a fashionable phrase in SEO circles, but the concept is as old (if you can call it that) as the internet itself. To use another SEO buzzword, we're talking link bait. In essence, it's all about the web page's content, and how it attracts natural inbound links.
Ah, now I've gone and spoiled some perfectly good SEO jargon for you. By the way, if you're like me, your preference is to take those obscuring technical terms, and turn their purposely hidden concepts, into easily understandable ideas. I like to take the fun out of the obscurity crowd. Spoiling a party that's for just the cool kids is fun, in an off centre kind of way.
Anyway, back to organic search, and content, and links, and all that good stuff.
In the early days of the internet, not many people worried about search engine rankings all that much. The now ubiquitous Google was still years away from your desktop search yearnings. For the old schoolers, the way to get noticed was by surfing the net from site to site. The ties that bound those websites together were links.
If a site offered interesting and informative content, another website owner would create a link to the page. While seemingly an old and slightly rusty concept at first glance, the modern form of organic SEO was born. It's still with us today all dressed up in new clothes as link bait. It's still the same old thing in a new jargon coated wrapper.
Search engines including Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, and Ask reward good content that attracts one way inbound links. It has always been that way. The only changes have been in the levels of emphasis.
Currently, the best inbound links are one way links, from traditional sites and blogs, that share the same theme as your blog. In other words, your blog about elephants will benefit more from a link from another elephant blog, than with a link from a blog about carrots. That's not to say that the carrot blog link won't provide some earch engine ranking push. The value received simply won't match the benefit from the theme related elephant blog link. That was easy, now wasn't it?
For gaining those coveted theme related incoming links, you must provide interesting and informative content. That's what is meant by the trendy term of link bait. Think of a great post as a fishing lure out to catch the big one. If you thrown an old boot over the side of your boat, you might catch a fish after several weeks. Use the correct bait, and the fish will bite all day long, providing you with plenty of dinner. It's like that with blog posts. No one is going to link to anything that's of no value to anyone.
To get even more benefit from your blog posts, place a keyword phrase in the title. Since the title of the post is often quoted, those keywords will appear on the clickable link line of the inbound link over at the sending blog. Search engines like that sort of thing. Be sure to use the same keywords a few times in your post as well. For organic SEO, it's very helpful in classification of the content for the benefit of the search engines. It lines things up nice and pretty for their computer ranking calculations. You don't want to disappoint them.
You also make things handier and easier to understand for your readers. After all, the best link bait for organic SEO purposes, is to provide posts that people will actually want to read and recommend to others. The recommendation of your blog arrives in the form of one way inbound links. Bloggers are free and generous linkers, who link happily to their favourite posts. For organic SEO, that blog spirit of information sharing, reminiscent of the early internet days, places blogs several steps ahead in the search engine rankings.
Everything that's old is new again.
Providing great blog posting content as link bait makes organic SEO a natural outcome of your blogging efforts. Organic SEO power is yet one more great reason to start and maintain a business blog.
There you have it: technical SEO jargon made simple.
Now you can rest easy.
