When the vast majority of users want to find information, they use an internet search engine.

Search engine optimization, or “SEO”, is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines. All major search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo have primary search results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. Payment isn’t involved, as it is with paid search ads.

SEO is extremely complicated as there are so many factors involved in the rankings of a website. In fact, it is so dynamic that even if a site owner were to “bribe” a Google SEO expert, there would still be no way to ensure improvement in a sites ranking.

Each search engine has its own algorithm that processes data accumulated nightly from index “crawlers”. Index “crawlers” are small programs, or “bots” that do their work by traipsing or following through every link on every page of every site on the internet.

Some of the factors that affect search rankings include, clarity of titles, clarity of words used in the content of a site, the number of links, the words used in the links, the quality of sites linking to the website, and quality of the website itself. As Google is the current leader in the search engine world, they have a great deal of power in creating the rules, as well as the penalties, for the entire SEO industry.