Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a name given to the process of ensuring that your website can be easily searched by the web search engines. Having a site which is 'Search Engine Friendly' can help get your site a better position in the search results returned by the web search engine.

Web search engines like Google and Yahoo use software programs called 'robots' or 'searchbots' which traverse the web looking for content and content updates. One part of SEO is ensuring that the pages that make up the website are easily read by the search engines.Website pages are written using language such asHTML or XHTML which aredefined by industry-accepted technical specifications. These specifications define the machine-readable syntax and vocabulary of the language.By ensuring that the pages of the website adhere strictly to the technical specifications of the language, we can be certain that the pages can be read fully and easily by the searchbots.

Another aspect of SEO for a website is the use of Search-Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs. This is the process of labeling the global address of the individual pages in a manner that is better understood by the searchbots. They are also more 'people-friendly' as well. An example might be a URL like www.AcmeHardware.com/Nails.htmlwww.AcmeHardware.com/index.php/option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=7. When asked to locate URLs about nails, the first URL would be more likely found than the second in this example. versus a URL such as

Other important aspects of a website which affect the ability of the search engine to index the website include description, page keyword metadata, CSS specification adherence, searchbot-readable sitemaps and much more.