Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of creating Web pages that will rank high in search engine returns. The process and practice of optimizing your website so that it ranks well on search engine results pages SERPs. SEO is accomplished by optimizing certain sections or "elements" in the HTML coding of each page. Users normally tend to visit websites that are at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the query. If you have ever wondered why some of these websites rank better than the others then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique called SEO.

This is the technique which helps search engines find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query. In other words, it helps you get traffic from search engines. SEO considers the actual search terms typed into search engines. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content "onpage optimization". Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic "offpage optimization".

There are some large amount of companies that adopts a Black Hat SEO or spamdexing, it's an unethical technique that are against search engine policies. They use methods such as link farms, keyword stuffing and article spinning that degrade both the relevance of search results and the quality of user-experience with search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices. If black hat is used by SEO, website owners are more vulnerable from being banned.

How do search engines work? They are not humans, they are text-driven. They are far from intelligent creatures that can feel the beauty of a cool design or enjoy the sounds and movement in movies. They crawl the Web to see what is there, looking at particular site items (mainly text) to get an idea what a site is about, using a piece of software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google). Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web, it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified, sometimes crawlers may not end up visiting your site for a month or two.

SEO is not just a one time thing, it is a process that must be continually pursued in order for a site to get the right amount of traffic. Traffic essentially means that users are coming to your site. Ideally, these users are also future customers. All of these reasons are why it is very important to hire a company who is ranked as one of the best in the field of SERPs.