Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the basic skills you need to know and understand in order to make money online. This article gives you a brief overview of what SEO is and how you can apply it to your website.

If you're interested in making money online, there are two key things your website has to accomplish. It has to be seen by a ton of visitors. (We call that "traffic".) And, some large proportion of your visitors need to do whatever it is you want them to do--fill out a form, download your book, click through to your affiliate site and buy the product. (We call this "conversions".)

SEO addresses the first of these two concerns--traffic.

There are a zillion ways of getting traffic. You can pay for it with pay per click, for instance. Or, you can create it through manipulating your web page content so the page naturally appears in the top ten results every time someone searches on whatever keyword your page is focused on.

The process of manipulating your content so Google and other search engines naturally return your page near the top of their organic search is what SEO is all about.

Let's look at how you accomplish this.

First off, let's understand what I mean by "organic search results".

When you search Google for a particular term, you get the search engine results page (SERP) with the results of your search on it. That page is broken up into three sections.

1. At the top are two search results. These are almost always spots the advertiser has paid for via Google AdWords.
2. Along the right-hand side are a list of ads. These, too, are paid for with Google AdWords.
3. Starting two lines down from the top and running down the rest of the page are what we call your "organic search results".

Organic search results are not paid for. They are the results that Google thinks will best fulfill your search term.

Independently of returning results for searches, Google is busy cataloging web pages. They have software called "spiders" that comb the Internet returning web page addresses and content. Google makes a sort of map of these web pages, so that when you search on a particular term, they can return the web pages that are already cataloged, which seem to best fit your particular search term.

Google's whole mission in life is to return the most relevant pages possible for your search term. (It really is! This is their corporate mantra.)

So, the goal of SEO is to get your web page to rank as high as possible in Google's organic search results.