Oftentimes, you'll hear people who are anti-search engine optimization (or "SEO" for short) say things like "I've never heard an SEO professional who could define SEO in one sentence. Well, you're about to get it.
It's simple. Search engine optimization is optimizing your website to maximize your ability to rank highly. Wikipedia gets more complicated with it, calling it "the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results for targeted keywords." Wow.
I bet you have more questions, don't you? Maybe you're wondering, "how?" "Why is "ranking highly" important? Aren't these things I can do myself? How long does this take? How much does this cost? While a lot of these questions are topics for another article, a couple of them can easily be addressed here.
How does it... do whatever it is I just said? Simple. Think of how you use a search engine. You type in a few words to your favorite search engine (these "few words" are called a query) and hit enter, awaiting your results. Your eyes scan the results page. What next? You either click the first result, the result that appears to be the most relevant, or the result that seems most interesting.. thus abandoning the initial purpose for searching in the first place.
It's important to look at how you - the average user - searches because that's the first step to figuring out the best ways to be found. Looking at those three situations listed above, wouldn't you want to be the one to benefit from those three situations? It might prove to be difficult for you without the help of a little seo. It could - essentially - have a large effect on your bottom line.. and we all know that money talks. That is what makes search engine optimization so important.