Search engine optimization refers to the entire body of techniques that you can make use of to improve the ranking that your web site receives in the listings of the major search engines. Most people who search for information on the world wide web start their search with one of the primary engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN. These search engine sites are served by web crawler programs – programs which follow links across the world wide web to collect information on new addresses. When these web crawlers find a new web site they try to identify its content by how it looks and what kind of sites links to it. 

Depending on things such as the kinds of key words and phrases which are used in the web site, the web crawlers will find a ranking for the site relative to different things that users can search for. Search engine optimization helps you to make your web site come up higher on the search listings when people search for a term – you can make this happen by using a lot of different techniques, but in general they are focused around the two areas of content and links. 

With the right content, web crawlers will be able to correctly identify your site, and with enough links incoming to your page, web crawlers will decide that your page is important enough that it should be high in the rankings. The higher you are in the rankings, the more people will visit your page when they are searching for the topic that you built your site around!