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SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is the process of improving the volume and/or quality of traffic to a website or blog from search engines via natural search results. The most commonly used and known search engines in the USA are Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL and Ask. Bing is Microsoft’s rebranded and upgraded search engine.

There are many more search engines but these are the big ones with Google taking 64.2% of the market, Yahoo 20.5% and Bing 8.3%. AOL and Ask share a few of the remaining bits.

April 2009 saw Google grab 9.5 billion searches to provide an indication of the size of this market. This is the USA market only. Google has a larger chunk of the market in other countries while in some countries Google is second to a local player.

As an internet marketing strategy, SEO focuses on ways to promote a website or blog to the front of the search results. The earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine.

SEO may target different kinds of search, including word or phrase search, image and video search, local search and industry specific vertical search engines. This is what will give a web site web presence.

SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. The process of optimising a website involves editing its content. It also deals with HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove any barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

‘Search engine friendly’ sites refer to web site designs, menus, content management systems, images, videos, forms, shopping carts and other web site elements that have been optimised for the purpose of search engine exposure.

The leading search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages already linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically. Some search engines operate a paid submission service that guarantee crawling.

Such paid for indexing usually just means inclusion into the database but do not guarantee specific ranking within the search results. Google offers Google Webmaster Tools for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages of a site are found, especially those that are not discovered automatically.

Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is automatically indexed. Webmasters may instruct crawlers not to index undesirable content. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine’s database by using a meta tag specific to robots.

As a marketing strategy effective SEO may bring more traffic to a site but does not guarantee sales. A successful internet marketing campaign may therefore use SEO as part of an overall campaign to drive organic traffic to web pages.

In addition to SEO the campaign may require paid advertising as well as high quality web pages with persuasive content and analytics programs to enable the site owners to measure successes and improve conversion rates.