Organic SEO: The Foundation of Search Engine Marketing
Posted by Mary Gammel on August 31, 2009 under Organic SEO | 
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I met with a prospect recently regarding an organic SEO project on his firm’s website. He’d just recently read a book on SEO and was a bit overwhelmed. He knew SEO was important as 80% of his clients come from the web. So, even a small improvement in his website’s visibility would be a big boon to his bottom line.
When you’re overwhelmed with something as broad as Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing, it’s a good idea to break it down into parts. Let’s use the example of a house. Our house is a one-story ranch with a basement.
In our example, the house – the sum of all the parts put together – represents Search Engine Marketing or everything you do to market your website to and for search engines. The first floor represents the marketing of our website including social networking, links, email campaigns, blogs, pay per click, etc. The basement represents organic SEO.
So, why is organic SEO relegated to the basement? It’s not because it’s unimportant junk that we hide away till the next garage sale. Instead, it’s the foundation which holds up the rest of the house. Think about what would happen to your house without the foundation. Most likely it would start sinking into the ground, list to one side, and be structurally unsound.
The same holds true with organic SEO. If you don’t have a solid foundation here, then people will have a harder time finding your site via search engines and if they do find it they may just leave right away because your site doesn’t have the information that corresponds to their search query.
Another reason organic SEO is the basement of the house is that it’s behind the scenes. We don’t necessarily see it when we first visit a site. There may be subtle hints of keywords placed in a plain sight as part of the website’s content, but much more is done behind the scenes in the html code and structure of the site.
To get the foundation of our house, we pour concrete, erect crossbeams, lay conduit, and so on following the local building codes. For organic SEO, we build a website that can be found by search engines’ robots and spiders. To do this we need optimized keywords, meaningful content, standardized HTML, and so on that all fits together to build a solid base for our first floor.
Now think about your own website, does it have a solid SEO foundation that supports your other on-line marketing efforts?
For more information regarding organic SEO, please visit the Organic SEO section of our blog and the Organic SEO Explained page on our website.
By the way, if you’re interested, the book mentioned above is The Truth About Search Engine Optimization by Rebecca Lieb
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