Search Engine Optimization: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of developing a website so that it ranks higher than others on search engine results pages (SERPs) for a particular set of keywords or key phrases. Without SEO, a site won't be able to get much web traffic at all.
According to a recent PEW Research study, 87% of the U.S. uses the Internet, which is about 277,436,130 people. Of this massive amount of Internet users, 92% use search engines frequently. A whopping 80% of whom look exclusively at the organic (non-paid) results, and 75% never look past the first SERP.
This means that the overwhelming majority of people are only going to look at the top 10 organic search results.
In order to get there, websites need to make it easy for search engine crawlers, which are bot programs that index sites and rank them, to determine the site's relevancy and content. In order to do that, these crawlers look at specific factors, like a site's URL, title tags, content, links, meta data, image tags, headers, and more.
The process of making a site more attractive to these crawlers is SEO.
The easier it is for a crawler to determine a site's relevancy, quality, and authority, the better it'll rank. The better it ranks, the more traffic it'll receive. The more traffic it receives, the more business leads it gets. The more business leads a site gets, the more sales opportunities there are.
Basically, SEO helps sites improve their search engine rankings so that they can get more targeted web traffic.