 Welcome to a brief overview of SEO. This learning activity is for anyone interested in the basics of search engine optimization, also known as SEO. We've all used search engines to find information on the web. Do a search for just about anything, and you'll get back thousands of results. Chances are you'll pick one of the top 10. Very few people scroll down. There's so much available information that websites constantly compete to be at the top of the search results. So what can a website do to improve its ranking in searches? How can it bubble up to the top of the results? One of the most powerful tools is SEO. Proper optimization of your site for search engines will lead to higher rankings and page visits. You might think SEO is about making modifications to search engines to make them better, but it's not. The focus of SEO is on your site. What modifications can be made to make it more attractive to search engines like Yahoo, Bing, or Google? These modifications, which include well-planned structure, site maps, and engaging content, all serve to make the site more attractive to both web crawlers and visitors. Proper SEO can help ensure your visitors are engaged by your content and will return to your site. If you think of SEO as a three-layer cake, the layers would be site organization and structure, then site optimization, then analytics. And finally, the finishing touch, or the frosting, would be promotion, which includes, among other things, social media, blogging, and paid ads. It makes sense that a well-organized site leads to a good visitor experience. The visitor can find what they're looking for and will be more eager to explore. But what effect does structure have on SEO? To understand this, we must first understand how search engines work. Search engines use web crawlers. Web crawlers are always crawling, ranking, and sorting information in data farms for quick retrieval. So when you type a question into the search engine, or if someone submits a request, the search engine looks at the stored information, returns the relevant results, and then ranks the results based on the popularity of the website. If the site is well-organized and has a site map and directory, it is easier for the crawlers to make their way through all the data on the site. There are many different approaches to SEO. Focusing on site structure and optimizing your content are great places to start. Ensuring your site is well-organized and that you've included both a site map and directory will increase its rankings. Now that we have an idea of what SEO is, how do we know if we have done it properly? Well, you likely will experience increased traffic and new customers. One way to find this out is through analytics. Another way is to watch as your site moves up in search result rankings. Analytics are the third layer of the SEO cake. They can help you identify areas of improvement on your site. In addition to optimizing site structure and content, you can also pay to increase the site's rankings in search results. Often, the top five or so results may be labeled add or have add written in a yellow square to the left of the site listing. This means that the site paid money to increase their prominence on the page. SEO can be inexpensive and easy, yet very effective to improve both the user's experience and increasing traffic to your site. Congratulations! You've completed a brief overview of SEO.