Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
As a critical online marketing technique, Search engine optimization (or simply SEO) helps your website gain more Internet visibility (and hence more traffic) and improves your site's web presence. SEO deals with natural, unpaid, algorithmic methods of attracting more attention online. Contrast this with SEM, which deals with improving your website's visibility through paid ads (such as Google AdWords), paid placement (sponsored listings), and other marketing methods.
Search engine optimization requires you to view your website like a customer and also view it like a search engine. Search engines are not people. They are computer programs. Yet they determine whether or not your website will pop up in the first 5 pages of search results, and in essence how much new traffic your website is capable of attracting online. If you write your website just for the search engines, however, you may lose your human traffic because your website isn't user-friendly enough (or it may even get banned if a site is judged to be created to manipulate search engine listings). The trick is to create a website that's both search engine friendly and user-friendly. Then you will see an increase in your site's ranking. Finding this balance between the needs and wants of the human visitor and the needs of a search engine is what SEO is all about.
SEO deals with hundreds of variables. Search engines are virtually blind; they will not rate a website higher because of graphics or fancy Flash animation. Search engines deal with words and text. The more sophisticated search engines also rate a website's rank based on popularity, links, and other factors. However, graphics and Flash and other user-friendly elements can help your website's human visitors stay on your site and assist them in finding the information they are looking for, so a combination of both informative, search-engine friendly text and user-friendly graphics is important.
Yet another gamut of Search engine optimization regards the HTML coding and the organization and construction of the website itself. The way you create your website can be just as important (as far as how high you are ranked by search engines on SERPs) as what you say and show on your web pages. Search engines prefer to read HTML documents in a certain way, conforming to established HTML standards. They like things like site maps and streamlined coding, that make it easy for spiders to crawl, organize and index a website. Search engines dislike things like broken links, outdated coding, and any association with "bad neighborhoods" or spam-like techniques. Good search engine optimization specialists ("SEO Specialists") are trained to help you recognize where your website can be improved, and (if they're honest and experienced enough) a SEO Specialist can tell you where your investment will go the farthest to improve your website and attract more website traffic.