Organic search is the use of search engines to find information on a topic. Search engines provide a list of results based on keywords and phrases. These results are not paid advertisements and are valuable for e-commerce sites. Good SEO practices increase a site’s ranking and visibility to search engines. Visits by search engine robots are not considered organic search.
An organic search, also called natural search, refers to the use of Internet search engines to locate desired information on a particular topic or to find answers to specific questions about a topic. The information or answers could be provided by a single web page or blog, or it could be dispersed across many pages that make up an entire website. The searcher simply types a keyword or key phrase into the search box of a web browser and hits the “enter” key or clicks a word such as “go” or “search” to start the search.
The search engine being used will then provide a list of organic search results linking to sites it has been programmed to find useful to the searcher. The results list provides page titles, short descriptions and hyperlinks to web pages, blogs or websites. Internet users click on links to sites they think may be of interest to them based on the titles and short descriptions shown in the list. These listings are said to be organic search results because they are not paid advertisements. The results of an organic search could be thought of as free Internet marketing, which is extremely valuable, especially for an e-commerce-enabled site.
Despite the usefulness of paid Internet advertising, competent web developers and designers understand the importance of organic search results. This is why they follow good and honest search engine optimization (SEO) practices. SEO is basically the preparation and tuning of a web page or website so that it is not only highly visible to search engines but is also highly ranked by these bots. Attention is given to aspects such as keywords, key phrases, valuable backlinks and header information to increase the site’s ranking, which in turn can increase its position in organic search results.
Some people might think that periodic visits to a site by search engines, which are actually types of computer robots, are included in the definition of organic search. This, however, is not the same as a person typing keywords and key phrases into the search box of a web browser, because the purposes are different. The search engine actually visits, collects information and indexes web pages in building a huge database. It can then provide, in list form, what it calculates to be the best search results based on a person’s queries. While the method is the same, using a search engine on a particular website that searches only for that particular site is not considered an organic search.
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