Organic Ranking

Also known as “natural” ranking, is both a designation and method to bring user traffic to any web site without the use of pay-per-click, or any other type of paid advertising that places a company or organization at the top of a search results page.

Google, Yahoo!, and Bing search engines combine advertising and user’s search results with paid and non-paid links. Links to companies who’ve paid for advertising are designed to look similar but are usually displayed with a different color background and are either placed at the top of the search results page or on a column to the right of the main list area.

There are several factors that impact organic search rankings. These the presence of original content, well planned and executed navigation throughout the website, well-chosen back links, overall organization and quality. Below are a few suggestions for increasing page rank through organic or natural online marketing techniques.

Content: For the most part, on any website, content is “king.” Both informative and original content is probably one of the most important factors in building and should be an objective for improving organic search engine rankings. Cutting and pasting text / content on a site from another is not only frowned upon but when detected will lower page rank overall and is frowned upon by most users. New content should be well-written and on-topic for whatever is being promoted or sold. This not only brings users back to a site but also signals to the major search engines that a site needs to reviewed / ‘spidered’ more often. Relevant and accurate articles are often referenced by others and will translate into links from other sites as a resource- which brings us to back links.

Back Links: When another web-source links to a page on a website, this is considered a back link.   This is another way to improve organic search rankings. Back links help search engines determine what your content is about and in essence is a vote of confidence that search engines uses to rank a website- the more credible the back links, the higher a page or site ranks.

Navigation / Organization: Above all, website owners want visitors to find pages and content, and this is also what the search engines are also checking for. Menus and links should be concise and to the point, and where the users can quickly and easily access. Broken or dead links are a no-no, so website administrators need to take time to review page and external links to make sure they are still valid.

Continually improving organic search rankings is high priority and in most cases is a job for an individual or team and requires both planning and execution. Organic search rankings take time, therefore, when creating or updating a website, allow for the time it takes for the search engines time to crawl and index your pages. This process can take a few weeks but in the meantime content and quality can be improved.