SEO (search engine optimisation)
- is the ancient art of attempting to make your site appear higher (or earlier) in search engine results when someone searches for a word or words relevant to your site. [keywords]
- is the process of making your web site as identifiable as possible to both people and search engines.
Most search engines present a mix of sponsored results and natural (or organic) results. Many savvy businesses want their sites to appear first in the natural search results as in theory this is effectively providing both free advertising, but more importantly highly targeted leads that should result in an increased chance to convert a lead to a sale.
Choosing your target is critical in being efficient with your SEO efforts. There is a massive amount of competition out there, all trying to win the SEO-race, with a sizeable amount unfortunately using underhanded techniques that can make it that much harder to join & win the ‘game’
There is an art to researching the best keywords to use, which we’ll go over in a future article, however saying that you can get to a bloody good start by taking a peek at the competition.
SEO is pretty much a big old fashioned popularity contest, except the rules aren’t known & constantly changing, you’ll never know exactly who and how many entrants there are, and the contest organizers can take your shining golden trophy from you whilst you’re sleeping smugly after your hard fought victory.
SEO Basics 
There are some basics of SEO that you need to learn and use, even though they’re not always guaranteed to work!
Search engines want to provide the best quality results. All sorts of fancy things go into the mixing-pot of code they use to automatically search the web (spider) & find content that matches the millions of search requests made every day.
Simply put, content is king.
Well structured content with appropriate use of headings, links, images (extra points for appropriate ‘alternate text’), a website that is fast, easy to crawl, has a sitemap & logical page structure & much much more external factors such as who links to you, the importance of that page linking to you
So, why should you use Search Engine Optimisation? 
- drive relevant traffic to your site
- increase leads
- increase sales
- free advertising
- keep up with the competition – then get ahead!
Resources
SEO defined at Wikipedia