Organic.  This word carries with it a sense of goodness, purity, and naturalness.  Or if you’re like me, you’ve probably succumbed to clever and commendable advertising and the word ‘organic’ is now undoubtedly synonymous with Whole Foods.  Within recent years we’ve seen a huge market push to become “more organic” in our food choices.  This could be due in a large part to the wonder works that is Whole Foods’ marketing and advertising, or perhaps you could say that the people behind the ad campaigns were smart enough to ride the coattails of the organic movement itself.

Whether the grain-fed, free-range chicken or the brown, cage-free egg came first I don’t really know, but the “organic explosion” doesn’t stop there.

Try SEO on for size.  Search Engine Optimization discards the unnatural and preservative-packed process of pay-per-click online advertising that only features ads of the highest bidder without consideration of content quality.  SEO gets you seen online not through ads and PPC campaigns, but through organic, grassroots growth of your online assets.

Take blogging for example.  The more content you post that is centered around what people are talking about and searching for within your industry, the higher your blog is ranked in search engines.

So obviously the next question is how do you do that?  The answer is simple.  Great content—content that is honest, original, compelling, informative, and loaded with applicable keywords and relevant links.

Now, I’m not promising that great content alone will catapult your blog to the tippy top, but it is the fuel that feeds the almighty search engine fire.  In order to enhance your blog, you need to optimize it with keywords, key phrases, and credible links.

The more relevant your keywords and the more reliable your links are, the better chance your blog has of becoming numero uno, and that’s how Google works.  The unremitting Google bots in Web outer space are constantly crawling the Web and once they come across your content, they will index it, and Google—compromised of a Search Quality Team, Webspam Team, and 10,000+ remote testers—will estimate the domain and page’s overall authority based on links and keywords, and voilà!  Your page gets ranked.

The bottom line is that the Google quality control filters are there for a reason, and if you try to trick Google by creating a content farm—a site that uses keywords, headlines, and faulty links to lure Web-searchers into looking at ads— or some other method, you will be caught and you will be punished.

While these crafty techniques were working as recently as a year ago, Google has caught on, and this is the official word on the street (from Google, of course).

“Traditional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a Web page.  We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the Web and determine which pages are most important.  We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted.  By combing overall importance and query-specific relevance, we’re able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.”

So stop trying to trick the algorithm, and get back to the good stuff.  The organic explosion doesn’t stop at food.  Realize that good old-fashioned, organic content enhanced with significant keywords and credible links is the way to go.  Get back to the basics and make Google recognize you for all the right reasons.