What is SEO (Search Engine Optimation) ?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the process of getting traffic from the search results on search engines.

According Wikipedia, Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page  on the search results in a search engine's.

Search engine 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 internet users. 

SEO may target different kinds of search, not only web and article content, but also including image search, video search, news search and other visual display.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content, HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.

SEO techniques can be classified into two categories
White Hat SEO is a techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design. An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. It is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.

Black Hat SEO is a those techniques of which search engines do not approve or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.

Search engines may penalize websites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether.

SEO for international marketing
Optimization techniques are highly tuned to the dominant search engines in the target market. The search engines' market shares vary from market to market, as does competition.

Successful search optimization for international markets may require professional translation of web pages, registration of a domain name with a top level domain in the target market, and web hosting that provides a local IP address. Otherwise, the fundamental elements of search optimization are essentially the same, regardless of language.

SEO