Search engine optimization is both an art and a science.  The search engine is one of the most basic components of the Internet.  As the name suggests, a search engine, allows people to find pertinent websites based on information they had entered.  Many different studies have revealed that about 90% of Internet users use a search engine daily.

Websites are designed with a target audience in mind.  It is the goal of the website owner to attract surfers who are interested in the content their site offers. It is this relationship between the interested surfer and the website owner that makes the search engine such a critical part of the Internet.

Any website can be listed in the search engines, but in order to receive significant amounts of traffic from search engines, a website needs to be in the top of the listings. When somebody searches for a word or phrase on a search engine the search engine returns a list of websites. The websites which appear at the top of the list are usually the most visited websites because surfers tend to not scroll through pages and pages of results.  They can usually find what they are looking for the first few listings.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving a website’s rankings in the search engine listings. SEO has become a huge industry on the Internet as companies compete to develop the most successful SEO strategies.

As search engines have evolved over the years many search engines have implemented a paid advertising mechanism.  Obviously, paid listings, increase revenue for the search engines and allow website owners to pay for top listings.  Today, the most popular example of Pay Per Click (PPC) would be Google Adwords. When a user performs a search on Google the results that appear highlighted at the top and to the right are usually paid for by the advertiser.  When a user clicks on these ads, the advertiser pays, Google profits, and the user is directed to relevant content.

The remainder of listings on the search engine results page (SERPs) are considered organic results (not PPC). The search engines find pages for the organic searches by using robots/spiders (software programs) to gather information about the content of pages on the internet.  The goal of SEO is to modify a website in such a way that it scores high for a particular keyword or phrase in the eyes of the visiting search engine.

What makes things tricky is that each search engine views pages differently. The SEO tactics that work well for Google may not have the same impact on Yahoo or MSN. SEO experts must stay on top of the latest search engine strategies for all of the major search engines in order to gain top placements.

The search engines play a very important role in a website's traffic but SEO is just one of the tools today’s website owners must use to generate targeted traffic. Traffic building is a gradual process that involves SEO, paid advertising, link building, etc but SEO is a tool that should be a part of every website owner’s traffic building arsenal.