SEO: This is an online marketing strategy that involves boosting the ranking of a website in the SERPs of a specific search engine. SEO modifies different aspects of a website so as to achieve improved rankings in relation to relevant search queries; it enables a lot of organic traffic. This is one of the essential factors for businesses and websites wishing to attract targeted visitors and grow their online presence.

Keyword research is basically the heart of SEO. It is the process of identification of words or phrases that the end customers or users are likely to input to come up with the kind of results they want. Selection of the right keywords will be used as the backbone in making suitable content and organizing the website for a user’s needs. Keywords have to be inserted naturally into the content along with titles, headings, and meta descriptions to maximize chances of ranking higher for those terms.

These three major categories of SEO are on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.

1. On-page SEO: Improves individual web pages to become more friendly to search engines. This is the improvement of content’s quality, proper use of keywords, and optimization of any heading or URL structure other than images. Another important issue for on-page SEO is internal linking, which may help both users and search engines navigate the website much easier.
2. Off-page SEO: Off-page SEO refers to external efforts to increase website authority. This mostly entails backlink building, where backlinks from other websites point to your content. The more strong and relevant links in a website, the more authoritative it seems in search engines. Social signals, online mentions, and guest blogging form some of the elements that account for off-page SEO.
3. Technical SEO: The elements that go behind the curtain of a website. It makes sure the website’s code is optimized, it loads fast, is mobile-friendly, and can be readily indexed by search crawlers. Issues, such as broken links, duplicate content, or even the wrong internal link structure, might pull rankings down.

All these practices, combined, help rank the website higher, therefore more likely to attract visitors who seek specific products, services, or information. It improves usability, validity, and ultimately supports the business’s goals by pushing more relevant organic traffic to a website.