Organic SEO or natural search engine optimization is one method in achieving optimization. To optimize your site means to help the people most likely to benefit from the website (your target audience) to discover your website through search engines by ranking highly with (and therefore appearing earlier in the pages of search results of) major search engines, like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.

Search engines have one main goal: to present their users with the most relevant and useful information. They do this by identifying key characteristics of relevant websites and creating algorithms for their indexing programs around these criteria.

It is called organic or natural SEO because a website that fits the search engine’s relevancy criteria should also be (in theory) valuable to the web user. If a website is a hit with the user, then it should naturally fall within the search engine’s criteria and appear higher in ranking. In other words, there is no exchange of money for placement in the results pages when using organic SEO.

There are various techniques involved in organic search engine optimization, which can be separated into two groups:

1. tasks that improve the web user’s experience and
2. those which make the website easy for search engine indexing programs to fully spider a site.
   

Some SEO methods are super SEO powerful, falling into both categories and end up enhancing usability as well as index-ability. In contrast, some SEO methods that help the search engine spiders crawl websites better also detract from user experience, and vice versa.

Organic search engine optimization procedures may involve the website’s coding, presentation, structure, content or fixing any problems that may interfere with the search engine’s spiders from indexing the site. Here are just a few:

• Adding unique and relevant content
• Inserting keywords in the content (SEO copywriting)
• Strategic hyper-linking of keyword-rich anchor text
• Using keyword terms as part of the navigation, structure and coding
• Making the site more user-friendly
• Working high quality and relevant outbound links into the copy
• Attaining quality and subject-related inbound links

A good SEO company will use all of these tactics (in varying degrees) and more for a diverse and effective SEO strategy.

The Apollo Media Twist:

If there is any question as to whether an SEO tactic will result in a low user experience, Apollo Media always opts for the more user-friendly outcome. Why? Simple: by aligning our goals with the search engine’s, that is, creating a valuable website for the user (with SEO in mind, of course), then a website will inherently slide into top placement.

Do you feel that your website could use some help getting noticed on the Internet? Contact us today and talk to an Apollo representative about your customized SEO strategy.