Organic Traffic (SEO), Let's search Google for the keyword "Joomla." Figure below shows the results of this search in September 2007 (I wonder if 58 million websites are really using Joomla).

Figure 1

This search greatly illustrates the difference between organic and PPC marketing. The results that appear on the left are ones produced by the Google algorithm (more on that later in our section about how Google calculates PageRank). These are ranked by an insanely complicated formula used by the search engine. The search engine is trying to find the most useful sites connected to the keyword that you used in your search. Here we can see that www.joomla.org is number one.

The results on the left are what would be called organic (or natural) results, and the results on the right (and sometimes along the top) are the PPC results. These people pay to appear in this listing. Interestingly enough, you can see that Adobe is now paying to be advertised on Joomla searches. As we will see later on, there are some huge implications in where your website appears on this page.

So let's start learning about how to increase your organic search engine ranking position (SERP). There is a massive amount of information about SEO, SEM, and SERP. You have to be careful, though, about the quality of the information you get. There are huge numbers of people who would be happy to take your money for some e-book and run. Here is an example.

See what I mean? That is an actual example of one of the millions of people selling these services on the Web. The real truth about search engine optimization is that there is no "silver bullet" anymore. It used to be true that you could stuff a few keywords into some metatags and get lots of traffic. Now search engines are much smarter. Google recently released its patent #20050071741 on its "Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data" (that's that little search page to you and me). In the document were over 118 factors[1] that affected a website's position in the search engine's rankings!

This is the real truth about SEO: There is no such thing as search engine optimization anymore. The only reality now is having a long-term web marketing strategy and a commitment to building a site full of quality information.

Having said that, assuming that your site is one with quality content, SEO still has its place. Look at the statistics shown in Table below

Trying to get high organic ranking through SEO is important as we can see in the Pew Internet statistics. The search engine is the first step for the vast majority of people trying to find information on the Web.

SEO used to be about trying to game the system. This worked three years ago, but now search engines are much more sophisticated. Attempts to stuff metatags or put lots of hidden text on a page are more than likely going to get you penalized. This next point is very important to understanding SEO: A search engine tries to find high-quality content based on a keyword search.

To be most successful at organic SEO, you need to meet this need. Create a site with lots of high-quality content and make it easy for both search engine spiders and human Web visitors to find and read.

Let's look next at the steps in a roughly chronological order that you might take as you launch a new site.

Now a little word about some software called "Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data" (Google)