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Organic search engine optimization is the goal of just about anyone who wants to be found on Google, Yahoo, Bing, or the engines of tomorrow. In the purest sense of the word, people want to be at the top of the unpaid search engine listings, solely on the merits of their own site, without paying a penny for traffic, links, or SEO consulting. Also referred to as "natural" search engine optimization, it is usually a misnomer because most of the top ranking sites in any field need to use some artificial means to achieve competitive search engine positions. Even if a site once ranked "naturally" based on its own merits, it probably didn't take long for motivated SEOs to usurp that site's position.

Can you get real results using "organic" SEO practices, assuming that you're referring to the classic method championed by Google's Webmaster Guidelines? The answer (like all things SEO) is a little bit yes and a little bit no. We have seen new exact match domain names with no links or submissions appear in the top 20 results within the space of a few weeks. This is probably because Google is able to find sites based on server propagation updates. Most people in the SEO world will tell you that a domain match for a keyword phrase is likely the result of the search engine giving you credit for a "navigation query" which is not (technically) the result of SEO. However, buying a .com, .net. or .org domain name that exactly matches a high volume search can put you in the natural results quickly, so it can be a good substitute for very expensive link building.

For most sites, the organic way of getting found in the search engines falls flat. You can build a website, do excellent keyword research, have great original content, and add features that are the envy of your online rivals, but you still need to get it connected to the rest of the Internet. In the world of engines like Google and Yahoo, this is done by getting links. Some sites, like Facebook or YouTube, became popular because they were so interesting (to their users) that people recommended them to their friends and linked to them from blogs, websites, and online postings. Although this is the classic tale of organic growth, it is still something of a misnomer because these sites could have become popular without the help of search engines.

If you want to get a link to a site that is useful but not fascinating, you are going to have to work for your links, by asking vendors, customers, friends, and neighbors to link to you. You are going to need to define how the link is structured in order to play along with search engine algorithms. You will also likely get links from popular web directories, even though the value of the link exceeds the traffic you ever expect to get from the directory. At this point, you have probably crossed into a gray area of link buying, but buying a link in the Yahoo directory creates a definite SEO advantage. If you check out the profiles for the top 10 ranking sites in Google for most good terms, you will notice that just about every site other than Wikipedia is using a certain level of skill in obtaining links. The process of securing links can be one of the biggest minefields in SEO, since some paid link schemes can get you filtered for your most important keywords.

See his full article at: http://www.submitawebsite.com/blog/2009/09/organic-seo-requires-fertilizer-and.html