Organic SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process to increase the visibility of a website by striving to place a site at the top of search engine results.  Normally a person inputs a keyword or keyword phrase into the textbox of a search engine like Google, which in turn provides a list of all the pages it thinks you will find most useful and relevant in relation to the keyword phrase you typed in.  The resulting listing is called a Search Engine Results Page or SERP.  The goal of an SEO expert is to achieve a number one ranking on all the major search engines.  My strategy is to rank number one in Google.  Google has over 60% of the market share, meaning they have more search requests than the rest of the search engines combined.  If I achieve a top ranking on Google, I almost always an in the top 5 positions in Yahoo, MSN and Bing.

There are two way to get to the first page of Google.  One is to buy your placement, the other is to provide highly relevant content and then work hard to get it ranked well by Google.  The problem with paying to rank for Google is that once you stop paying, you are no longer listed. Another drawback is that you would have to pay each search engine for place on their respective pages.  By providing relevant content and using SEO experts and SEO techniques, you can get ranked for free, in the main SERP listing.  This is called organic SEO.  With organic SEO you never have to pay.  You are listed because it is the search engines mission to provide useful, relevant results.  By executing good SEO techniques, you will get listed on all the search engines.

Here is an example of Paid SEO listings

Here is an example of free ( organic SEO )

Paid SEO is a fast and easy way to get your site in front of potentially thousands of eyeballs every day, but can be very expensive long term.  Organic SEO on the other hand, is slow and takes a lot of man hours to rank well, especially for a very competitive keyword, and can be very expensive in the short-term.  Once your site has been established and is has a high organic SEO for several keyword teams, it can bring in tons of visitors everyday for free.  Often times a combination of both methods will work best for a small business.  Set up a budget for paid SEO or Pay Per Click PPC, campaigns, while simultaneously working on your organic SEO results.  Once you are ranking on the first page for a particular keyword, drop it from your PPC campaign, keep repeating this until you no longer need any PPC.