Natural SEO is a set of practices and tactics used to increase visibility and traffic to a website through search engines.  The tactics range from content creation to best practices in code writing. A search engine's function is to deliver the most relevant results to a user's search query. If optimized correctly a site should appear in more searches and at higher positions in those searches.

 

Natural SEO is:

 

Natural SEO isn't a way to get as many visitors to your site as possible. Rather it is a process of attracting qualified traffic to your site; a properly optimized site should cut down on bounces (visitors who leave after only viewing the landing page) because that site provides the content they were in fact searching for.  SEO isn't a way to dupe people into visiting a particular site and search engines will actually penalize sites that are perceived as doing so.  

 

Natural SEO isn't:

 

Too many people aren't baking in SEO best practices into their development plans at the onset.  SEO should be an encompassing facet of your web development strategy, before your site is even built.  It should factor into your content operations, your IA, your code structure, and your ongoing maintenance and operations.  As with many tactics, retroactively applying SEO is harder than using it as a standard process and incorporating its tactics into your development plan and practices.