Search Engine Optimization, also referred to as SEO and website marketing, is the highly successful process of driving more traffic to a website via the search engine rank. After a search is performed using a search engine by an Internet user, the first ten websites to appear usually acquire the most traffic. SEO and website marketing are techniques used by businesses and other entities to enhance the traffic to their website, which in turn helps them make more money. To effectively optimize a website, the owner of the site needs to edit its content and HTML coding to increase the relevance of the website to specific keywords.

The design and development areas of a website can have SEO and website marketing tactics incorporated to make it easier for people running the site to obtain a higher search engine ranking. The technique of Search Engine Optimization falls into the broader category of Internet marketing because businesses use SEO and website marketing to help with the marketing and sale of their products and services. Marketing a company’s products and services has become easier with the growth of the Internet because people browsing typically do so on their own. For the most part, people search the web alone, which makes it easier for companies to market their products and services to an individual and not a group of people.

When companies use SEO and website marketing techniques to market a product, they appeal to specific interests of the public via search engine rank of specific, targeted keywords. Companies have learned that marketing their products to a specific interest or to a specific demographic instead of a broad demographic will work out better for them in the long run profit-wise. Other methods of SEO and website marketing include article marketing, pay per click, digital marketing, lead scoring, media transparency, in-text advertising and inbound marketing. Marketing a site’s shopping cart and certain pages of the website are done with Search Engine Optimization and other techniques of website marketing. In terms of market share, Internet marketing has overtaken radio marketing.