Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an ongoing process of optimizing your website to make it attractive to the search engines, getting it indexed and then rising in the search engine results, hopefully to the first page of Google for each of your keywords.

SEO can be looked at in terms of onpage optimization and offpage optimization. Offpage optimization is considered the more important of the two in impacting your rankings.

Onpage optimization consists of constructing your webpages with the best keywords, keyword density, page title, use of < h1 > and various tags, and other elements. Which elements are important varies with which SEO expert you talk to.

Offpage optimization consists of getting backlinks for your webpages, preferably from other sites with high page rank and relevancy to your site's topic, using your keywords in the anchor text.

An important step in search engine optimization is to analyze what your competition is doing and do it better than them, to ultimately rank higher.