SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization is now a standard process among Internet based businesses. SEO, or optimization is one of the processes that helps improves the volume and quality of traffic to the business' web site. This is done by promoting the website in search engines, increasing their ranking in SERP or Search Engine Results Page.

Ranking is very important when it comes to promoting traffic to the sites. The higher a site ranks in SERP, the more searchers will tend to visit that site. The logical premise goes: the more visitors there are in a site, the more actual or potential business it tends to generate.

Optimization can also help target different kinds of searches. In Google alone, they have searches for web, images, news, groups, scholar or scholarly discourses, blogs, books, finances, maps, patents, products and special, more refined searches (for example, software programs, downloadable software, etc.) to name a few. In some websites, there are more industry specific vertical search engines, and for some country based search engines, there are also local searches available.

These days, optimization is considered one of the best marketing strategies to help increase a site's relevance in SERP. Optimization practices consider carefully how search algorithms work, and what people are actually searching for. Searches are basically defined by the keywords that the Internet users type in. These keywords are matched with the title of the pages, headings, meta tags, meta names, contents, etc.

Optimization efforts involve learning a site's coding, its presentation, and its structure. Efforts are also being made to "fix" or overwrite any coding problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully accessing a site. The term is called "spidering:" a very visual corruption of the general idea that the Internet algorithms move as "spiders" that are "crawling" through the web sites programs. Search engines have "spiders" or search engine robots: algorithms that can comb through websites, rating the sites according to the relevance, by simply matching most of its contents with the keywords.

Another possible service of SEO includes adding unique contents to a website, ensuring that content is easily indexed by the spiders, and thereby making the site more "attractive" to Internet users.

Black Hat SEO or more commonly known as spamdexing is a more controversial form of SEO practice. It uses methods like link farming and keyword stuffing that does very little good for Internet subscribers. With the advancement of Internet protocol, there are now some search engines that routinely look for sites that employ these techniques and remove them from their indexes.

The term SEO can also stand for "Search Engine Optimizers." This term refers to any person, consultants or employees who perform optimization projects on behalf of clients, whether they are in house clients or clients outside the operating companies. Optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Some SEO practices may be incorporated into web site development and design, which effectively changes the HTML source code of a site.