SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has as a main objective to increase web visitor counts by ranking very high in the results of searches using the most appropriate keywords describing the content of your site. There are no Search Engine Optimization secrets -- just ranking and placement methodologies to follow in order to beat your competition in obtaining a high ranking for desired search keywords.
It is not enough to simply add META tags and do search engine submission of your site to a million search engine indexes and directories. Many steps and points need to be visited, and we'll touch on many of these in the next 5 days.
Little history.
SEO began in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a site to the various engines which would run spiders, programs to "crawl" the site, and store the collected data. The search engines then sorted the information by topic, and serve results based on pages they had spidered.
As the number of documents online kept growing, and more webmasters realized the value of organic search listings, it became imperative for search engines to sort the vast collection of pages they had spidered and display the most relevant pages first. This was the start of a search engine vs. SEO struggle that continues to this day.
Initially, search engines were guided by the webmasters themselves. Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information like meta tags. Meta tags provided a guide to each page's content and relevant keywords. Soon some webmasters began to abuse meta tags, causing their pages to rank for irrelevant searches. In response, search engines developed more complex algorithms, taking into account a wider range of factors, but they still relied largely on what are today known as "on-site" factors.