This post comes to us from the Market Leader blog:

Organic – it's not just what's for dinner. Like organic food, however, organic traffic to your website is obtained naturally – without paying for it or having it referred from a directory or another site.

In fact, organic traffic is sent to your site because the search engines "think" your site is interesting or relevant to the search terms. They like you – they really like you.

Since not every real estate agent can make it to the front page of Google, the question of the millennium is: "Why not?"

Why Doesn't My Site Show Up in Google?

Google uses a long list of criteria – over 200 factors – to determine which pages rank for which search terms. The whole process is bundled in what is known as an algorithm, defined by Google as "... computer programs that look for clues to give you back exactly what you want."

When a user enters a search term, the algorithm clicks and whirs and tries to guess what the user wants to see. It does this by considering terms on the site, how fresh the content is, what region the searcher is in, and "page rank."

So, although just owning a website and publishing it to the Web doesn't necessarily mean you'll automatically rank, it is the first step.