The advantages to optimising in this way are best understood by thinking about “real world” relationships. It’s a pretty well known and popular fact that everyone is roughly six relationships, or “degrees” removed from a famous person. Apply the same logic to search engine first place optimisation and you realise that your site is not only six degrees away from a “famous” site (i.e. a website that lots of people use), but from every other site on the net.
Here’s how it works. Think of everyone you know. Now think of everyone they know who you don’t. Then think of everyone this third set of people might know, and all the people they know, and so on. By the time you get to six degrees out from you, you are linked top pretty much everyone else in the world. You do that for your website and it starts to get referrals from places and sites you’ve never heard of. That’s how search engine first place SEO can work for you when you treat the web as a network of intersecting relationships: you start to get “introductions” to other sites, and before you know where you are people who use those sites will start using yours too.
Successful organic SEO promotes this kind of behaviour by active involvement in the right kinds of web community. You post blogs on genuine forums, about things relevant to your business and the products or services you provide. You recommend products and services that compliment your own. That way your customers will naturally start going over to other useful sites: and those sites, recognising the increase in traffic volume, may well start referring their own customers back to you.
There are strengths and weaknesses involved in this kind of search engine first place optimisation, just as there are good points and pitfalls when you get involved in “standard” keyword optimising. On the plus side, search engines view what appear to be natural links (of the kind just described) with greater favour. If you have a visible presence in a community that has relevance to your business; and if you are closely aligned with sites that search engines believe to be “authorities” on your subject, then you will get a high volume of incoming traffic and a good SERP ranking.
There is less direct control involved in this kind of search engine first place SEO, though. You are relying on the “real world” to give you real recommendations – which involves a lot of spadework and preparation before you start to see results.
