The most basic question about SEO is what is it? Here are a few answers that I found on the web:

from Legal Internet Marketing

“Creating and improving a website so that it will rank high in the search engines and help potential customers and clients find the website.”

from Search Engine Writing

“A form of online marketing , search engine optimization (or search engine marketing) is the process of making a site and it’s content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. Sucessful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases.”

from Wikipedia

“SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines vias natural (organic or algorithmic) search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it ranks, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of searches, including image search, local search and industry-specific vertical search engines. As a marketing strategy for increasing a site’s relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms works and what people search for.

SEO efforts may involve a site’s coding, presentation and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site.”

From personal experience, I know that it’s not unusual to spend too much time and effort simply trying to make web pages rank, while losing sight of the reason why you want them to rank in the first place, which is to attract qualified traffic to a web site.

Web sites are created for people, not for search engines. However, by pleasing the search engines, more people are likely to see your web pages. So, what do the search engines really want? And how can we give it to them? See:

Back to SEO Basics-Demonstrating Relevance