As the name suggests, SEO is optimizing a website for Search Engines. The reason to do so is to get found by people who use search engines to find information, look out for services, purchase products online etc etc. As search engines are programs, they have a set of parameters that decide which websites are to be displayed on search results. Nowadays search engines are so advanced that they index or crawl almost all websites, but the question is who will be displayed on the top results for a certain query.

Almost 70% of people do not go beyond 1st page for a certain term query. Out of these top 5 search results get 90% of the traffic. Now, with billions of people using search engines worldwide, it has become a new marketing avenue for professional companies. To make themselves, the most “popular” search engine, SE’s ranks the websites according to the relevance and utility of a particular website for a certain keyword query. Different parameters are used to ascertain the relevance of a website, which depends and vary from engine to engine. And SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a process that works around those parameters to make a particular website rank on the top SE results.

SEO is broadly classified as ON PAGE and OFF Page SEO

ON PAGE
On page SEO is something that is done on the website only like proper Title of pages, Analyzed Meta Information, Linking strategy, Content of website, Site architecture, Usage of programming language, proper usage of images and tagging. This all is the first step for SEO and is done after careful and technical analysis of keywords.

OFF PAGE
This includes making your website popular over the net. As a thumb rule, “the more the relevant, informative and similar sites linked to your website, the better optimized your site will be” This is not so simple as it seems, you have to be very careful in choosing the sites that link to you (if you do it yourself) OFF Page is generally accomplished by various processes like :

•  Link Building – Asking other relevant websites to link back to you.
•  Directory Submissions – Submitting your website in relevant directories
•  Article Submissions – Writing and submitting articles in article directories.
•  Social Bookmarking – getting site popular by getting the site content/informative section bookmarked on     social bookmarking sites like Digg, Squidoo, Technorati, Del.ico.us
•  Social Networking – making site popular by getting site linked with people( people who have some kind of     relation to nature of website we want to optimize) on popular social networking sites like myspace, facebook,     orkut.
•  Blogging – creating similar blogs maintaining them and getting link backs from them.
•  Forum Commenting – Getting into conversation with people on similar discussion forums and leaving link over     there.
•  Buying links – buying high Page Rank Links
•  Press Releases – Submitting press releases and links in them

These are just the basic tasks broadly classified, the exact methodology if formulated only after carefully examining the website we want to optimize and for what keywords. And BEWARE wrong methodology can penalize your website, as search engines are very smart to sniff that someone is deliberately promoting their website. So it has to be gradual and natural.