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What is Organic Marketing?
Organic SEO, or the “organic” website growth model, is fairly straight-forward. It starts off by assuming that the ultimate goal of a website is to provide something useful to its visitors (and if you make money doing so, good for you).

Now, like any real-world store or shop, a website needs traffic . In the long run, this traffic cannot be dependent on any one source (like Google, for example). If a doughnut shop depended on the next-door police station ONLY and did no advertising, what do you think will happen to their revenues if the police station relocated? For a business to survive in the long run, they must diversify their sources of income, which in turn means that they must diversify their sources of traffic .

This is the first cornerstone of organic marketing – thinking long-term . The second component of organic marketing deals with the actual methods and practices of marketing – an emphasis on “natural” marketing and search engine optimization. We can use existing market exposure to create popularity, or a “buzz”, about a new product or service launch. Read the rest of this entry »

Over-optimization happens when your website is considered “too good” by Google – either in terms of a sudden volume of backlinks, or because of heavy on-page optimization. In other words, if Google considers that your website optimization is beyond acceptable limits , your website will be red-flagged and automatically restricted or penalized.

There is a fine line between over-optimization and spamming, and it is on this line that Google can appear to err. However, this is not a mistake by the search engine – in fact, Google calculates rankings by considering thousands and thousands of different factors – and a lot of importance is attached to average “trends” within the niche / keyword range that a website is optimizing for.

The bottom line is that over-optimization is non-spamming search engine optimization that is misread by Google as being beyond acceptable limits, thus leading to a penalty in search engine rankings.

What criteria does Google use?

To understand why Google can consider certain websites over-optimized, it is important to factor in the criteria that Google uses to rank websites. Read the rest of this entry »

I get to talk to a wide variety of prospective clients about search engine optimization and internet marketing in general. The amount of information about what search engine optimization is, is as varied as the motivations of the companies that employ it. To help companies understand the various aspects of SEO, I often make comparisons to things just about everyone can relate to. So here are a few reasons why effective SEO is like successful weight loss.

1. No pain, no gain. Losing weight takes work. You have to make changes in order to make a significant improvement. If your web site doesn’t rank well, you will have to make changes and those changes will cost time effort and money. In most cases there is not a simple, “painless” solution. Same goes for weight loss. For a great SEO program, expect to make an investment.
2. Changes must be long term. The current fads for weight loss often involve quick solutions like pills, concoctions and other “magic” programs, but they don’t work long term. The most successful weight loss programs include lifestyle changes, not some kind of quick trick. Read the rest of this entry »

There are four major ways to get traffic to your site: search engines, links from other sites, feeds (especially blogs) and advertising. Of those four, a lot of effort is spent trying to get a good ranking in the various search engines, especially Google. Why? Because a good ranking is a sure way to get a lot of traffic, and the #1 spot on the search engine results page (SERP) for a given keyphrase is a prime traffic generator indeed. (Well, assuming anyone’s actually searching for that keyphrase…)

Some readers I’ve talked to have expressed surprise in discovering their own page in the #1 position on a Google SERP. “How is this possible?”, they ask, “when there are no links to my page and it has no PageRank?”

There are two fallacies here. One is that the Google “link:” command shows all the links to a given page. It doesn’t, it only shows a partial list of pages that meet some unknown criteria. A better way to find out who links to your page is to search for your page’s URL while excluding your own site. For example, to find out which pages in Google link to www.memwg.com/blog/adsense I can do this search:

www.memwg.com/blog/adsense -site:memwg.com