what is SEO? What are its benefits? And how does it helps a website?

[Jeff]

SEO (search engine optimisation) as Rahul and Babe said, is optimising your website to rank as high as possible in search. The higher a website ranks, the more traffic (people viewing it) it receives, because it is closer to the top of the page. The volume of traffic drops significantly if a website is further down the page, and even further if it is not on page 1. How often do you go past the first 2 pages when you are looking for something in Google?

But SEO is more like a web of methods in doing this. In the beginning, a website must be designed properly. Nobody will waste their time on a slow loading, confusing, badly laid out website. Plus, search engines index these websites so the more 'keywords' (what your site is about/what people search for to find it) and relevant information you have on your site, the better Google, or Bing or others, will rank it.

Website design is very important in this and a lot of SEO agencies offer it as it is nigh on impossible to rank well with a poor website. Notice Nike and Tescos all have very easy to comprehend websites, if they weren't you would probably just go straight to their competitors Adidas or Sainsburys, and so they lose money.

The more traffic you get the more likely it is that someone will 'convert' ie, make a sale. Tesco makes money from people buying on its website, to do this it needs to attract you to its website first. This is what SEO is there to do. If you are looking for groceries, you type this into Google and the top competitors come up first. Once you are on their site it will be laid out to entice you and shower you with more options than groceries, tempt you with offers and you will end up giving them more money than you intended. SEO is a form of marketing like any other in essence!

I have read up a lot about SEO from Search Engine Watch - an SEO industry based website that will explain all of this. I have also used a website design service from a marketing agency because I realised how important it was to have a website already prepared for online marketing.

I hope this helps!
Jeff