Natural or organic SEO is not paid advertising, such as the pay-per-click ads that appear under the Sponsored Links subtitle on Google. High rankings in the natural search results are the outcome of the search engines deciding which websites are the most authoritative and relevant for a given keyword phrase.

Our organic SEO company can help improve your website from a usability and SEO perspective so that you will have top search engine rankings. Studies show that most Web users don’t even look at search engine results beyond the first page and the top five results on the first page receive the most clicks.

If you are serious about growing your online sales, SEO is a must for your website. With so many competitors in the online marketplace, SEO can help your website stand out and rise above the competition.

The organic SEO service provided by Web.com Search Agency has helped thousands of websites across all industries increase their rankings – driving traffic to their sites and dramatically increasing their sales. Contact us at 1-877-Rank-321 to learn how we can optimize your website for the search engines and enhance your online visibility.

Can you get real results using “organic” SEO practices, assuming that you’re referring to the classic method championed by Google’s Webmaster Guidelines? The answer (like all things SEO) is a little bit yes and a little bit no. We have seen new exact match domain names with no links or submissions appear in the top 20 results within the space of a few weeks. This is probably because Google is able to find sites based on server propagation updates. Most people in the SEO world will tell you that a domain match for a keyword phrase is likely the result of the search engine giving you credit for a “navigation query” which is not (technically) the result of SEO. However, buying a .com, .net. or .org domain name that exactly matches a high volume search can put you in the natural results quickly, so it can be a good substitute for very expensive link building.

For most sites, the organic way of getting found in the search engines falls flat. You can build a website, do excellent keyword research, have great original content, and add features that are the envy of your online rivals, but you still need to get it connected to the rest of the Internet. In the world of engines like Google and Yahoo, this is done by getting links. Some sites, like Facebook or YouTube, became popular because they were so interesting (to their users) that people recommended them to their friends and linked to them from blogs, websites, and online postings. Although this is the classic tale of organic growth, it is still something of a misnomer because these sites could have become popular without the help of search engines.

If you want to get a link to a site that is useful but not fascinating, you are going to have to work for your links, by asking vendors, customers, friends, and neighbors to link to you. You are going to need to define how the link is structured in order to play along with search engine algorithms. You will also likely get links from popular web directories, even though the value of the link exceeds the traffic you ever expect to get from the directory. At this point, you have probably crossed into a gray area of link buying, but buying a link in the Yahoo directory creates a definite SEO advantage. If you check out the profiles for the top 10 ranking sites in Google for most good terms, you will notice that just about every site other than Wikipedia is using a certain level of skill in obtaining links. The process of securing links can be one of the biggest minefields in SEO, since some paid link schemes can get you filtered for your most important keywords.

In a similar vein, the phrase “organic link growth” seems more theoretical than factual. For links to grow, you have to get traffic from somewhere. If you’re buying paid ads or PPC, then you will get traffic but it will not necessarily link back to you. At Web.com Search Agency, we have had new SEO clients come to us who have done PPC for years, and gotten tens of thousands of visitors, but had a minimal number of actual links. By acquiring links from trusted directories (like Yahoo) and relevant sites, we were able to provide rankings that hadn’t been possible with on-site SEO. The debate about whether link building is “100% White Hat” is colored by the type of links that are obtained for the client. We have seen some sites achieve good rankings from questionable link sources, but we prefer to help clients hook themselves into a network of links that adds long term value. Links of this type pass the “natural” test when we see real traffic coming from the referring site.

There is one category of SEO that would definitely fall short of the “organic” profile that search engines look for, and that is the site that uses black hat tricks to secure rankings. In most cases these practices are clearly artificial, and include cloaking, keyword stuffing, link spamming, and hidden text. Usually sites like these don’t last too long in the natural results, but some sites have a degree of link popularity or site age that seems to make them rank well despite their flaws. The use of black hat techniques can lead to penalties that might render your site invisible to the general public, and are not recommended. If you had your SEO done by another agency at some point in the past, you may also want to have it revisited by a professional because you may be incorporating practices that were once approved but are now disallowed. In a manner of speaking, the color of your hat changed while you were wearing it.

Google advises people to build their websites as if there were no search engines, but there is an obvious fallacy in this philosophy. Many people have come to us with sites that were built with no consideration for search engine spiders, and as a result they could not get ranked in their current condition. A site with no page titles, content embedded in images, and no external links just isn’t going to enjoy good rankings. A site that has been optimized for search engines, with easy spiderability, good titles, and relevant text is going to enjoy the advantages that come from search engine traffic. Search engines prefer a certain standard of usability, and that standard gets more stringent as websites evolve. Therefore the terms “organic” and “natural” get further from reality as search engines improve. In the world of SEO, it may be best to describe a well optimized site as “refined.” Even though an organic search optimization process may be an impossibility or oxymoron, your end goal involves getting your message out the general public, so being a little unnatural isn’t always a bad thing.