Search engine optimization (SEO) involves designing, writing, and coding a website in a way that helps to improve the volume and quality of traffic to your website from people using search engines. These “free,” “organic,” or “natural” rankings on the various search engines can be influenced, but not controlled, by effective SEO techniques. Websites that have higher rankings (i.e. presented higher in the search results) are identified to a larger number of people who will then visit those sites.

The majority of web traffic is driven by major search engines, including Google, Bing, YouTube, AOL, Yahoo, Duck Duck Go, Ask Jeeves and other country-specific ones (e.g. Baidu in China).