What is search engine optimization?

The expression “search engine optimization”  SEO is something of a misnomer as it not the search engine that is being optimized. The phase describes the process of designing or modifying a website in order to achieve high rankings in search engines results pages (serps). Search engine companies would say that we designers should simply get on with producing excellent content and making their sites easy to navigate and let the search engines get on with indexing the resulting pages. On the other hand it can be argued that the search engine algorithm designers have the best idea of what elements constitute we designed website and by learning from their ideas we should be able to build better websites.
 
Optimizing a website requires some knowledge of what factors search engine use when ranking a page and how significant each of these factors is for particular search engine. Search Engine use a mixture of on-page and off-page factors.