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Growing Organic Websites
By Ishbel Lane, Sat Dec 10th
The principles behind growing a healthy website are basic andsimilar to growing an organic garden. Most things seem to beeasily related back to the processes and cycles provided byMother Nature and your web business is no different. We call ouronline marketing system "organic" because of this comparison. Ifyou're looking for the next big get rich quick scheme - this isnot for you. If you are looking to build a sustainable onlinepresence please read on. --The Organic Website Analogy at Work-- You absolutely must start with a healthy base (your soil/yoursite architecture), make sure that all the essential elementsare present to allow for healthy growth of both the size andstructure that can support it, and that will bloom and provideyou with the fruits of your labor. Artificial additives(chemical fertilizers/paid submissions and placement) willeither burn you or give you vigorous growth that will yield youa large, quick crop - which may or may not leave you properlynourished or with sales and repeat customers. With artificialadditives you get results as long as you continue to purchaseand apply this external force.
In the garden, the chemical fertilizers don't help to build yoursoil, in fact you lose soil nutrients as you kill or scare awaythe soil organisms that complete that ecosystem. The artificialnutrients have no way of suspending themselves in the soil andimmediately wash out and continue to pollute the rest of yourenvironment (but we won't even go into that!). Your online presence is no different. As soon as you stop payingfor link listings, paid placements and third party services toboost your ranking you are left with little or no placement,depending on the quality of your site. The web you have woven tocatch visitors as it turns out was only held up by hired handswith no interest in your success. With no payment, they drop thenet and run off to find the next person willing to pay them tohold their world wide web. Your resources have been investedinto artificial growth and not into building a healthy, selfsustaining website. In doing so you may have devalued your sitein the eyes of the search engines and possible link partners,scaring them away until you can prove yourself to be an honest,quality site. Now rather than just starting from the ground up,you are buried under a pile of rubble. Large chemical manufacturers have convinced many people thatthey need to purchase their chemicals to have big, green plantswith big flowers and harvests. This is a great business modelbecause you grow a customer base that is almost completelydependant on purchasing your product. The next season you applythe chemical fertilizers or perhaps you see an "organic garden"and not knowing full well what that means, you put some plantsin the ground and try to go organic. You get no results becauseyour soil is void of nutrients from previous seasons ofartificially enhanced growth. At this point you can 1) run downto the garden center and pick up some fast acting chemicalfertilizer and save this year's harvest and continue running tothe garden center for chemicals as long
as you choose to gardenor 2) you can read and educate yourself about the basicprinciples, talk to your neighbor who has a successful organicgarden and then get to work, patiently building your soil in away that encourages the cycle of life to continue on withoutyour constant attention. Search engine marketing companies have done the same thing. Everheard "5000 links for only $9.99 per month!"? Please don't everfall for this! For one, as soon as you stop paying, what happensto your links? They’re gone. Plus, even five million links atlink farms that don't get human or search engine visits areabsolutely worthless! That seems fairly obvious to be a scam,although I am sure many have fallen for it. Even worse are themass "free" or "cheap" web design companies that will submityour website to search engines monthly for only $19.99 permonth. I see this as worse because as a consumer you depend onthe "professionals" in an industry to give you an honestservice. A year later you still haven't gotten a return on thatinvestment. Why? The search engines don't care that you pay somethird party 20 bucks, when your site doesn't have meta-tags, hashidden text, uses query strings, is in frames, is at a subdomain with a million other people or are on a server with a badreputation. With organic growth you add a little loving attentionoccasionally but the system is self contained and continues togrow on its own. In the garden, the plants die back or dropfruit and flower to the earth which are returned to the soil.The soil microorganisms feed off the plants and in return aeratethe soil and provide nutrients to the plants. The plants willcontinue to grow season after season and their seeds will sproutinto new plants. This cycle will continue to provide a harvestwith little or no effort. In the web world you start with aquality site architecture, you get to know your website, youbuild content that people want, and you sell a quality product.The search engines have extremely intelligent robots and spidersthat can usually tell if you are a quality, honest site. Buildit for your visitors and the search engines will follow. Ratherthan paying for links, build mutually beneficial linkpartnerships with other quality sites with similar interests.And last but not least, be patient! Anything fast and furious isusually unsustainable. I'm not saying you shouldn't ever pay for anything to help theprocess along, in the garden or website world. Just be carefulto educate yourself first. What are the basic principles behindthe system? What encourages healthy, sustainable growth? Getyour fertilizer from a compost pile or chicken farmer and getyour online marketing concepts from a trusted web professional.Ask your neighbor how to grow your garden. Ask Original WebSolutions how to grow your web business! About the author:Delivering Certified Organic Websites to your home and officesince 1999. The author owns and manages Original Web Solutionswww.originalwebsolutions.com, a full service web developmentcompany. Her company works to service nonprofits, artists,restaurants and small businesses of all types through low cost,search engine optimized, service based web sites. Seewww.servicewebsolution.com for more on these sites.
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