SEO Goes Green posted by Michelle Montoya on Friday, November 30th, 2007

As the campaign to go green by becoming more environmentally aware grows, so does the need for search engine optimization. Many users of the world wide web are becoming more world-friendly, and they’re searching for sites online. There are many parallels between going green and optimizing sites for higher search rankings.

Organic is Best

Buying organic products, such as foods, clothing, business supplies, and household organic cleaners, is best because they are made or grown using the least amount of virgin materials and because they contribute the least amount of waste and harmful chemicals. Using organic household cleaners instead of petroleum-based can help limit the amount of barrels of oil consumed every year. Because they’re vegetable-based, they’re biodegradable and safer for the environment.

Organic searching is the process of finding websites that don’t pay for advertisements that appear at the top and on the side of the results page. These searches are “natural” because the websites that are ranking are getting there without pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Search Engine Optimization helps websites rank higher based on their content and their keyword relevancy. Organic searches have greater click-through rates and higher conversions, and best of all, they’re (for the most part) free.

Recycle All Reusable Items

Recycling means taking a product or material at the end of its useful life and turning it into a usable raw material to make another product. This means that you will be contributing less to the landfills because you’ll be reusing (or will be sending the can, bottle, or paper off to be reused) materials for other purposes. According to the EPA, the United States recycles 32 percent of its waste, which has almost doubled during the past 15 years. But in order for recycling to work, everyone needs to participate in each phase of the process.

Link building is the process of having other websites link to your site. While it may sound simple, it is a lot of work and requires a lot of time and patience. When a site agrees to host an article or editorial, you’ll want to build content for that site around your keywords. After the content has been up for two to three weeks, you can recycle the article by changing the title and sentence structure and can then submit it to article directories. If you have articles that are similar and relevant, you can compile them into a free ebook to place on the site as well. Reusing content will provide multiple links from different places all going back to your site.

Conservation is Critical

Although it seems rather easy, many people have difficulties with conserving water and energy. By making simple changes - like turning off lights when you’re not in the room and turning off the water when you’re brushing your teeth - you can help conserve resources. Changing to a compact fluorescent light bulb (cfl) will save around 300 pounds of carbon dioxide a year because they use 60% less energy. When buying new products (the holidays are quickly approaching), consider purchasing energy-efficient products, such as washing machines and dryers, dishwashers, televisions, and even computers.

In SEO, you need to conserve and carefully utilize all of your resources in order to prevent depletion of time and/or money. While the process of optimizing a website to rank higher on search engines is a lengthy process, you don’t want to waste your time or your money on things that don’t matter. Pay attention to what’s important, like picking powerful keywords that are relevant to your site, avoiding things that search engines hate (like paying for links, for example), and bulking up your site with content that is relevant to your products.

Be a Part of the Solution

As we continuously strive to be better search engine optimizers and marketers, we might as well aim for becoming better world citizens while we’re at it.

Going green is a bandwagon we should all be proud to jump on.