Search engine optimization (SEO), a subset of search engine marketing, is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via organic or algorithmic search results. SEO can target contextual search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

SEO is marketing by understanding how search algorithms work and what human visitors might search for, to help match those visitors with sites offering what they are interested in finding. Some SEO efforts may involve optimizing a site's coding, presentation, and structure, without making very noticeable changes to human visitors, such as incorporating a clear hierarchical structure to a site, and avoiding or fixing problems that might keep search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts, involve including unique content on pages that can be easily indexed and extracted from those pages by search engines while also appealing to human visitors.

Be careful of websites who claim guaranteed search engine positioning. There are few common traps to be mindful of when shopping for search engine positioning services.

• The FIRST misleading guarantee is the empty promise of, We guarantee you top rankings or we will continue to work on it until we do. In most cases, this simply means that they will continue to sit on their hands and do nothing. Why? Because they already have your money. They are not really interested in renewals, they are very happy to simply take your initial fee. There is no real risk to them.
• The SECOND misleading offer is when a company promises you first page listings on Google and/or Yahoo, but fail to tell you that they are talking about sponsored listings and not natural listings. They charge you a set monthly fee and end up spending only a tiny portion of this fee on traffic from sponsored listings.
• The THIRD and most common misleading guarantee is the money back guarantee. This includes a guarantee that a certain percentage of your target keywords will receive top rankings within the major search engines such as Google and Yahoo. However, read a little deeper in their service agreement and you will see that their list of major search engines include seven or more small and outdated search engines which are very easy to generate top rankings in. This is the catch. While they will verbally focus on Google and Yahoo over the phone, the small print reveals the truth. They end up easily meeting their guarantee and you are still no where to be found on the search engines that really matter.
• Only the search engines themselves can truly guarantee top placement, and for ethical reasons, they can only do so legally through sponsored listings. Searching for a reliable Search Engine Marketer should rely on sample success stories and client referrals.
• Paid inclusion has not caused much concern. However, it has been suggested that search engines should improve the speed they pick up new websites and that paid inclusion services thus create a conflict of interest that discourages improving service levels across the board.
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