Most people think that organic search engine optimization (organic SEO) is about meta tags, keyword stuffing and internal links. While those efforts do help improve rankings and generate traffic, they're often viewed as the only factors in a search engine optimization campaign.
A newer concept coined "organic search engine optimization" or "organic SEO" has taken on a whole new meaning in recent years and has evolved to include everything from psychology, semantics and site usability to interactive elements like video, instant messaging and video games. Other areas of organic SEO study can include everything from link building and navigation to persuasive copy architecture and social marketing integration.
Today there are many powerful Internet marketing tools available online and vary in price from thousands of dollars to completely free. Click Track (no affiliation) makes an excellent product that uses the correlation between hand/mouse and eye movement to track everything a searcher does on any page of your website. It then makes a digital "heatmap" that shows how people are viewing and navigating your website and reveals tons about your page's design, content and usability. One recent study of an affiliate website promoting Nike's showed that a high percentage of searchers were repeatedly clicking on their banner graphic. It revealed that searcher's thought the banner was a link to a new Nike running shoe but got frustrated and left after several attempts at clicking the image. So they changed the banner to an image link and found their bounce rate for that page decrease by almost fifty percent and it was all based on this unique data. This is just one example of the many advanced tools that are used today that provides unique insight into search behavior, but it's usually for a hefty price.
Budget constraints aside, many companies miss golden opportunities when it comes to Internet marketing and forget to focus on the basics like great content, clear communication and clean design. I've recently heard this mindset referred to as "functionalism" and to me it is an integral part of organic SEO and is one of the most accessible and budget friendly. This article for instance, is an example of organic SEO and was designed to hopefully spark your imagination, promote my services and contribute something of value to the web.
The proliferation of this mindset of organic SEO is gaining momentum, especially as search engines like Google continue to try and improve their algorithms that encourage higher standards for website design, development and classification. A most recent and very noticeable example of this would be the new Google quality scores that are currently wreaking havoc for certain people industry wide. The benefits of an organic search engine optimization strategy have a tendency to resist changes to algorithms and continue to evolve on many different levels and encompass a broad range of technology, analytics and methodologies. So next time you're thinking about your Internet marketing mojo, think organically.
