How Can I Increase My Organic Search Engine Rankings?

Friends, family, colleagues and co-workers ask me that question (or some variation of it) at least once a week.  Unfortunately there is no magic trick, or simple formula to follow.  Increasing your organic search engine rankings is not something you can do overnight and in today’s instant gratification world, this can be hard for people to comprehend.  Compounding their frustration are the hundreds (if not thousands) of companies out there trying to “mask” their practices of plug-and-play AdWords  and other PPC campaigns as organic search engine optimization.
Increasing your rankings on the organic side of the search engine results requires planning, creativity and above all patience.  Three to six months may seem like an eternity to the MTV generation, but in search engine terms, it’s a blink of an eye.  I do not know how many times I have been approached by someone who makes a change to their website and than is frustrated when they don’t jump up in the rankings the next day.   Changes, especially subtle ones on in-frequently crawled sites can take many weeks to start showing up in the search engines.
So what can you do to help increase you organic search engine rankings? There are quite a few things that impact your organic search rankings, including, but not limited to; content, navigation, back links, organization and quality.  Let’s look at some of these things in a little more detail.

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