When a website owner publishes their website, they want to get traffic to their site.  Website owners don’t just want any traffic!  They want traffic related to the content of their site, be it a product, service, or information that they are offering.  More specifically, each website owner wants people who type in a specific word, set of words or phrase to find their site.  But, as in any competitive environment, be it in education, business, religious or non-profit organisations, there are other website owners that are seeking to drive the same Internet traffic to their site.

For a specific search query by an Internet user, a search engine (such as Google, Bing or Yahoo) may return several hundred thousand search results for a given search term or query.  These results are displayed on a search engine results page (SERP), and are the result of an organic search (i.e. not those search results that appear on the right – or on top - entitled ‘Ads’ or ‘Sponsored Links’).  Website owners want their website to appear on the first page, and preferably ‘above the fold’, i.e. visible to the user without having to scroll down. 

Why do some websites appear on the first page of the SERP, while others appear on the seventh page of the search related to a given search query.  This is a process that is entirely automated by the search engines.  The companies who manage these search engines have ‘spiders’ that ‘crawl’ the entire web, indexing it according to its content.  When a search query is entered into the search engine, the results are determined by a complex algorithm that provides the most relevant results for the desired keyword, keywords or phrase.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an Internet related discipline that has developed in the wake of the development of search engines.  The algorithms used by the dominant search engines are unknown to the public.  Yet through a study of pages that rank well on the search engines, and clues given by these companies, various characteristics on a website (e.g. relevant content, rich with master keywords), and on other website (e.g. backlinks pointing to the targeted landing site) can be developed such that search engines will rank the given site higher for the specific search term.  The term ‘search engine optimization’ was first used in a forum in 1997.