Search engine optimization (SEO) is a way of improving both the quality and quantity of traffic to a website from search engines through “natural/organic” query results for specific keywords. Usually, the higher a site ranks in the search results, the more searchers will visit that site.
Placement near the top of the rankings increases the amount of traffic to a site. However, more search engine referrals does not guarantee more sales. SEO is not necessarily an appropriate strategy for every website, and other search engine marketing (SEM) strategies can be much more effective, depending on the site operator’s goals. A successful Internet marketing campaign may drive organic search results to pages, but it also may involve the use of paid advertising on search engines and other pages, building high quality web pages to engage and persuade, addressing technical issues that may keep search engines from crawling and indexing those sites, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure their successes, and improving a site’s conversion rate.