Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a crucial digital marketing strategy focused on improving the quality and quantity of "organic" (unpaid) website traffic from search engines, aiming to boost visibility, conversions, and brand awareness. The practice emerged in the mid-1990s as web crawlers indexed the early internet, leading to webmasters optimizing site elements like meta tags for higher visibility; the term "search engine optimization" itself gained popularity around 1997, notably by Bruce Clay according to industry analyst Danny Sullivan.
Search engines have continuously refined their algorithms to prevent manipulation, now actively providing webmasters with tools and guidelines (such as Google Sitemaps and Bing Webmaster Tools) to support ethical optimization. Modern SEO has adapted to significant shifts, from Google's mobile-first indexing emphasis in 2015 to the more recent rise of generative AI in the 2020s. This shift introduced concepts like "generative engine optimization" (GEO), which focuses on optimizing content for AI-powered answers, and a broader approach to "search experience optimization."