The buzz on the street these days is buying organic and why not right? The health and environmental benefits of organic foods are too many to mention.  While these attributes work well for your daily produce picks, they often get neglected when it comes to business.  Now, you may be wondering, how can I possibly incorporate organic into my business and the answer lies in your marketing and more specifically in your internet marketing.

The great thing about buying an organic apple is that it has been certified organic by the USDA.  This means there is a certification process in place that is largely based on the production process for the food or materials.  Unfortunately for internet marketing, when it comes to getting organic search engine results, there isn’t a governing body monitoring your efforts or the final product; unless of course you consider Google a governing body?  So, how can you be sure that your SEO company is delivering real organic search results or if your results are artificially organic?

Organic search engine marketing goes back to the age old terms of white hat SEO and black hat SEO.  As a business operator looking to market online in a campaign of the highest quality, you want to avoid black hat SEO.  It is the black hat practices that deliver the artificial organic search results.  These are indeed fly by night results that yes, you are at the top for a few days after your SEO company has worked their black magic, but the results weren’t the real deal and not only do you quickly fall off the top search result positions, but you are likely to get Google-slapped and sent to the back of the line as well.

To stay true to being organic in your search engine marketing you need to remember that all things organic take extra time and extra work, but the results have better longevity and stronger presence.  Although every online marketing company may know the words ‘Content is King’, only truly good, quality content reigns for the long term.  That quality content then attracts natural links, avoiding the whole unnatural link farming approach to getting search results.  Organic search results are about creating a valuable resource on the web.  This resource is your website and it grows, adapts and changes to continually be a better source of information for visitors.

Rafferty Pendery

Ah, those were the days. Being in business used to be so easy. Promoting my business used to be easy too.  I was a painting contractor in Los Angeles in the 80’s. The competition was fierce but I knew what to do. To get my business going in a certain area I would drive around, find a good area and start door knocking. Personal contact was my forte. I never went more than an hour before I had a job. Another thing I did was to have my local flyer distribution service pass out a couple of thousand flyers and voila – WORK! It was that easy and that predictable.

But times have changed. If you don’t have a presence on the internet you’re nothing – second rate, behind the times. So you make the investment in setting up a web site. It feels good – hey, look at me I’ve now exposed myself to millions of potential customers. This is going to be easy, I thought. Welcome to the new world of the Internet. After the initial excitement of having my beautiful web site floating somewhere in cyberspace, I wondered why I wasn’t getting any calls. After all, I just spent $4,000 for this beautiful web site; the jobs are just going to start pouring in. Right? WRONG! It just doesn’t work that way, as I came to find out. Because of the staggering number of people searching the web, it has tremendous potential BUT you’re just a drop of water in a huge pond.

How do you stand out? How do you get them to come to your site over all of the others vying for their business? It takes a strategy to create links that point back to your site from hundreds of other sites related to your product. And you have to keep it up. One of the main ways of creating traffic to your site is through the use of article submission. For example, you write a short article about how to handle peeling paint. You then submit it to an article directory so others can find out how to handle peeling paint. They see your site listed on the article so they come to view your site as being an expert on what to do about peeling paint. And so it goes.

But don’t expect people to come flocking to your site immediately. You have to be committed and to stay the course. After all, you are competing with thousands, if not millions, of other people in your line of work and they all want to be in the number one spot when someone searches for a painter, florist, etc. in their area. If you can persist in writing and submitting articles that are relevant to your field, you will see your name moving up in the search engines. It’s wonderful to see your website show up on the first page of a search – and how profitable. The fact is that after the first page of a search most prospective buyers have found what they were looking for and the number of buyers who search the 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th pages drops off dramatically. So what do you need to do? It’s obvious; get your site on the first page. If there was a magical way of doing this everyone would be doing it no matter the cost because the return is big! How big? As big as the web itself.

If you have not yet researched out article submission as one way of gaining exposure for your product on the web then you should consider it in your marketing budget. It’s a long range strategy that has proven to work time and again. If you can talk about your business for just a couple of minutes, then you can write that same thing down as an article and have an article submission service submit it so it gets out to hundreds of sties that all point back to you as the source. People like to know about things that concern them. If the paint kept peeling on my house, I’d like to know why and the fix for it. So your hard won knowledge earned over the years is important to people. Let customers know you’re the expert and you’re the guy to call to get the job done. It’s not enough anymore to put a sign on your truck and drive around. To be credible, you have to have a web presence.

For me, I rather liked walking up to someone in the neighborhood, introducing myself, handing them my business card asking if they would like to get an estimate on getting some painting done on their house. It seemed much more personable and a much easier sell. But that was then, things change and you have to know how to play the new game without dropping out things that already work.

You can bet that your competitors know how important a high ranking website is to a prosperous future. From my perspective, marketing today is not as simple as it once was. There’s a new game in town and its here to stay. Part of your marketing budget has to embrace this new media. Its’ potential is immense! It would be difficult to over state it. It used to be so easy. But, why not, I like challenging new adventures in my life even if I have to change some old ways of doing things.

Did you know that Wikipedia is the second most visited site from Google Searches? Add to this knowledge that more searches are conducted on Google than on any other search engine and you soon realize that there is some serious traffic moving through Wikipedia and for good reason. Consumers turn to Wikipedia as a reliable source of information and more often than not, the online encyclopedia has got the information searchers are looking for.

Now, have you ever noticed that Wikipedia often appears in the top search results from Google for keywords related to your business? If so, I am sure you have wondered how to get that search result action for your business by utilizing Wikipedia. It is possible, but in order to be part of the vast information of Wikipedia, you must first respect the knowledge they share and fully understand the benefits of getting a listing with them. Then be prepared to monitor your listing as you do all portions of your online reputation.

There are multiple benefits to becoming part of the enormous human edited online encyclopedia. Having a listing with Wikipedia adds value to your business reputation and a transparency that can actually be a little scary for some companies. Having a listing can also provide added exposure for your business, as access to Wikipedia is not limited to PC and laptop users. Wikipedia is available on many mobile devices as a source for endless information for masses on the go. Then of course, because Wikipedia is a website with an outstanding page rank, a listing with the encyclopedia giant can add tremendous value to your search engine marketing campaign. Wikipedia should not however be considered part of a link building strategy. In an attempt to thwart the masses of spam and poor quality entries being made to their site, Wikipedia placed a ‘nofollow’ tag on all external links.

If you are interested in promoting your business with Wikipedia, you need to go into the project with the goal of adding value to the information source, not just using the website for gaining links and generating traffic to your website. You can’t or shall I say, you shouldn’t write your own Wikipedia listing and for good reason, there should be nothing self-serving and nothing self-promotional in your article. The best approach to getting a lasting listing with Wikipedia is to request a third party to write an informative biography, so to speak, of your company. To fully ensure your work doesn’t get the boot from the experienced volunteer Wikipedia community, make sure your content is full of quality sources and utilizes great references from credible media sources.

Subsequent edits to your Wikipedia listing need to be unbiased as well. The addition of the WikiScanner has provided the public with the ability to see exactly who is doing the editing, adding a whole new level of transparency that is not entirely loved by all. A great way to ensure a quality Wikipedia listing is to inspire others to add to your listing for you. A great way to do this is with some positive improvements in your company. Whether they are improvements in your products or services or making huge environmental changes to your industry’s operations. Events like these can literally move consumers to go to a Wikipedia listing and add the news in their own words for you. Always bear in mind, anyone has access to seeing who is doing the editing on your Wikipedia listing and if you are constantly “editing” your own page, it will raise suspicions and probably some criticisms.

The consumer trust in Wikipedia as a valuable resource is built largely from the transparency that Wiki encourages. By writing a quality listing about your company that actually adds value to the encyclopedia, you can help strengthen your online reputation, increase your business exposure and reinforce your search engine marketing strategy.

Rafferty Pendery
CEO Studio98