If you read the Introductory article, you should already have an understanding of the major importance of search engine positioning - if you missed the opener go here to read Search Engine Marketing - Is It Worth The Effort? before continuing on.
SEP goes by many different names - search engine marketing. search engine optimization, search engine placement, search engine promotion, SEO, SEM - I've even known a few people to refer to SEP as search engine listing or search engine registration ( which actually aren't the same thing ).
While it really doesn't matter what you call it...for the online marketer it certainly helps to know what it actually means.
To understand how to optimize a web site requires a basic grasp on how the World Wide Web is organized.
The actual hardware and systems that run the Web are referred to as the Internet. The pieces of information that live on the Web are usually held on websites. In order to access that information - a Web Surfer or Searcher needs to know where the info they are looking for lives.
Most searchers visit a search engine and type in their query in the search box on that site...this is one of the first skills most internet users acquire.
The search engine then scans rapidly through it's store of web pages to see which pages contain the search term contained in the query.
These pages are then served up to the searcher in the form of a list of search results. The searcher can look through and decide based on the Title and Description visible in the results which of the results are relevant - in other words which of the results provided by the search engine in response to their original query appears to be an accurate match.
The pages that are returned by the search engine in response to that original query are selected based on certain ranking criteria...in Search Engine Positioning - this is referred to as the algorithm.
That algorithm is at the heart of the entire field of SEP.
Obviously, as a merchant selling a product or service that fits the query entered in the search box - you want your web page served up on the first page of results.
Let's face it - if your site isn't ranked near the top of the listings - chances are very good to excellent that no-one will ever see it.
Which is why you need to know how to optimize your pages effectively...it isn't enough to simply create a website...and then sit back and wait for a flood of visitors...trust me on this one - without proper search engine positioning - you'll soon feel a bit like the Maytag repairman - it can get very lonely out there - all by yourself.
http://www.seoplus.com/search-engine-positioning.html
