Search engine optimization, more commonly known as SEO, is an important process that should ideally be done to every website. What SEO does is allow a site to attract more traffic and/or business by using certain keywords that make it more likely to appear in a search engine search. All web designers should make sure that the sites they design for customers are fully search engine optimized. When a page is search engine optimized, it simply means that it appears high up in the listing of "natural" or "organic" results found via a search engine. Natural or organic results are those results that do not include paid advertisements. A truly search engine optimized site will appear not just in text search results, but also in image search results, local search results, video search results, and news search results as well.

Usually, a page is search engine optimized in many ways. Text, often in the form of articles or blog posts, that contains keywords is one of the most common ways. Adding videos and pictures with captions containing certain keywords also happens frequently. Efforts to stay on top of the latest trends in search engine optimization and to use only those methods which are tried, tested, and proven to work sure pay off when it comes to ranking pages at the top of most search engines.

SEO experts work hard to determine how popular search engines work, what terms they should use to search for a website such as the one being designed, and which search engines most people in the target group are likely to use. Through careful study and observation, they then draw a large amount of traffic to the site they designed, helping both the business for which they were designing the site and their own reputation and credibility.