Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - A process of increasing number of visitors to a website by ranking high in search engine results. The top positioning in search results increases the chance of user clicking on it and visiting the website. These days Internet is playing a vital role, irrespective of the industry if a person is looking for a service, information, provider, merchandise or anything the first thought would be Lets Check on Google. Thus if there is a website, which is not optimized for search engines then it is equivalent to not having a website. If your objective is to target the global market, your website optimized for search engines can be the best tool. Below are some figures from an article published on internet: -

87% of all visitors are from page 1 position

91% of Internet users use search engines

Over 250 million searches carried out daily just in the UK, then how much would be globally?

73% of all online transactions start with search engines

When someone says that he/she is doing SEO of a website it means that various activities are being performed on altering website so that it does well in organic, crawler-based listings of search engines. In the past, has also been used as a term for any type of search engine marketing activity, though now the term search engine marketing is more commonly used as an umbrella term. SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to search engines and improves the chances of site being found by search engines. And it is essential for a website to be optimized for search engines otherwise the purpose of having a website gets defeated.

A number of factors are important when optimizing a website, including content, structure of the website's copy, page layout, HTML meta-tags, standards used for designing HTML pages and the submission process. While a site is being optimized it includes four main components Researching Keywords, Adding META Tags, Submitting website on various search engines and Exchanging links with other related websites.
The activities that are performed on the website pages are placed under On Page SEO and activities which are not performed on the website pages falls in Off Page SEO head. The process of optimizing a website starts with researching keywords, then on page and finally off page, which is an ongoing process.