Nowadays we have almost shriveled the practice of stuffing our databases with lots of web addresses; the credit largely goes to the advent of search engines. But a decade back the reliablity of such search engines was questioned predominantly because of the inability of search engines to prioritize the sites exactly to the requirement of users. A specific tool emerged for this requirement termed as search engine optimization often mentioned as SEO. Search engine optimization is the process of ameliorating the quality of traffic to a site when linked from search engines by organic or unpaid results. SEO can be applied to all searches including image search, local search etc.

Coining of the word SEO dates back to late 90’s by the active entry of big players like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing. The basic purpose of optimization is to both increase the relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Regardless of language the fundamental elements of search optimization are essentially the same. The webmasters are involved in developing more complex ranking algorithms, considering the additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate. Leading search engine use specific crawlers for their client spiders. The Search engine crawlers take into consideration a lot of factors when crawling a site. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in deciding whether or not pages get crawled. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages are found automatically.

Typically, if a site appears on the top of a search results list, it will appeal easily to more visitors. Therefore the hosts are hiring search engine optimizers also known as SEO’s who potentially improve the site and its popularity among search engines. By this way a SEO can ensure that a site is designed to be search engine-friendly. But there are some unethical SEO’s who give the hosts a black eye through their aggressive marketing strategies. They usually manipulate search engine results in unfair ways. There are also some inexperienced SEO’s who stuffs in lot of keywords specifically to get priorities. Such practices that violate the guidelines of webmasters may result in a negative adjustment of the site's presence in search engines or even elimination of such listings from their databases altogether. Penalties will applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms, or by a manual site review

Due to the high marketing value of targeted search results, there is potential for an adversarial relationship among search engines regarding popular sites which may cause irrelevant results to users. Since the success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its ability to produce the most relevant results to any given search, allowing those results would prove fatal for its usage. Therefore search engines must adhere to specific tactics that could eliminate spamdexing altogether.

Many online forums and blogs are persistently assisting to eliminate all the loop holes that prevent proper prioritization of sites. Therefore, the phenomenal change achieved in field of search engines through SEO requires constant innovation and validation of search results elating its prominence.