Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a term used by Internet marketing professionals and website owners to describe the field, art, science or practice of optimizing a website to achieve top positions in a Search Engine Results Page (SERP).  A SERP is a listing of web pages, videos, images and other web content returned by a search engine (such as Google or Yahoo) in response to a keyword query.

You need a strong and well built/designed base to achieve optimal SEO results over a long period of time.  The base is the foundation of your website.  Building your website properly will give you the best run for your money in regards to achieving optimal results in SEO marketing.

In a nutshell and without going into details, the base starts with a “business plan” or a concept of purpose with as much research as possible about your purpose.  From this business plan you evolve the structure of your website to display your content (purpose), apply semantic structure and formatting that promotes proper usability and functionality and using building blocks of XHTML, CSS and other programs, scripts and web software that meet or exceed W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards helps to achieve this well built base of your website.  The hand-crafted copy is then placed into this structure and is the muscle and partial skin of the website.  CSS formating of the copy, adding multi-media items where appropriate (where you make a larger impact then with words alone) help build the skin and dress-up the website for user appeal, helping to increase user retention (time-on-site) and reduce the visitor bounce rate.

Further details will be explored in future SEO lessons to include writing the copy of your web pages while applying proper semantic structure and keyword placement and density into the copy, XHTML and CSS tags, titles, names, links, etceteras.

Further SEO lessons will include XHTML and XML sitemaps, Google and other SE Webmaster Tools, web page beta testing, website analytics, proper use of multi-media content, proper design of navigation and web page usability.

Conclusion of this series will migrate into lead generation through SEO practices and then through SEM (Search Engine Marketing), which is where you pay for rankings (ads), leads and other marketing activities, listings and campaigns that require money to enable their deployment and generation.  Some people in this field like to consider SEM the main Internet Marketing term making SEO a subset of SEM.  I like to think of Internet Marketing being the main field, SEM and SEO as two specialties or variations of Internet Marketing.  Internet Marketing, which for some businesses, may need to interact with main stream Marketing to bring a successfull marketing campaign to fruition.