Organic SEO

Organic SEO is the process of SEO on your website performed passively by other people, rather than actively by yourself. Active SEO is the process of yourself writing more content and gaining more backlinks for your website. This takes planning and considerable time. By initiating certain processes you can have other people complete some SEO tasks for you, without them even knowing.

Organic SEO tasks and benefits

There are many SEO tasks that you can implement to improve your websites visitor numbers from search engines. These are discussed in the SEO summary. All of these tasks take time and planning. However, several can be contributed to by other webmasters and visitors to your website. Lets look at the SEO tasks that you can encourage people to do for you:

Linking to your webpages

Gaining more backlinks to your website is a vital part of SEO. Most SEO's spend considerable time trying to gain links from web directories, article directories and via reciprocal linking. More important are the 'natural' links to your website. Natural links are those where people with a website or blog link to your website, because your website offers good content or services. There are a few things you can do to encourage this.

• Add a 'link to us' text box, or similar control, that provides the anchor HTML to the visitor. The visitor can then easier copy this HTML code and add it to their webpage. A variety of people, with a variety of websites will link to your pages, as long as your pages provide good content or services. Remember, content is king; the better the content, the more successful the website or webpage will be. Long term you can expect a good number of backlinks from using this method. Over time, as the page receives more visitors, the number of people linking to the page will also increase. This technique is especially good at gaining backlinks to pages within a website, rather than just to the homepage, which tends to be the case when you actively gain backlinks from web directories and other similar sources. For maximum success add a 'link to us' control on every page of your website, and make it easy.
• Provide web pages of good content or quality services. Any web page offering good content or a quality service will naturally have people link to it. Many SEO's spend much of their time on SEO tasks, rather than writing or reviewing their content or services, to ensure they are of the highest quality. The better the quality of your content or service, the more people that will naturally link to it. Adding a 'link to us' text box, as discussed in the point above, will help people to link to your web pages.

Writing content for you

Writing content is time consuming. However, you can encourage people to write content for you. The content should be related to the topic of your website, be of good quality, and add value to your website. Adding content that is unrelated to your website, or is of poor quality is not a good idea. You can invite people to submit articles to you, just like an article directory does. You can offer people a link back to their website if their article is accepted. This is standard practice with article directories. You may find many people will submit articles to you that they have already posted on other websites or article directories. If you want to avoid any of the search engines duplicate content penalties then you should be sure that the submitted content has not been used on other websites. This is easily done by using a search engine to search for a large chunk of the content. Obvious matches with be shown in the search engine search results.

Writing reviews

Reviews are one of the best ways of having people contribute content to your website. A lot of people are keen to provide their opinion about things. You can ask people to contribute reviews for just about anything: web pages, books, movies, news stories, etc. Search engines consider reviews as a good source of content. You can also offer a prize for outstanding reviews. This has worked extremely well for Amazon.

Posting forum topics and replies

Forums are a good way of increasing the content of your website. Encourage people to post and reply to topics on your forum. With your popular web pages you can create a forum topic and link to the topic from the webpage. People will be keen to discuss hot topics. Be sure to moderate your forum, to avoid negative or bad comments.

Posting comments

Allowing people to post comments about web pages is a great way of building more content on the page. People love to give their opinion. Having comments at the bottom of a web page is a popular approach. The comments will generally contain the keywords of the web page and topic, and are a great way of boosting keyword counts. Be sure to moderate your submitted comments for negative comments, and especially spam.

Summary

Organic SEO can greatly help your SEO campaign. If you implement just some of the ideas on this page you are likely to see an increase of the number of visitors to your website.