Search engine optimization or SEO is the process of analyzing and optimizing websites so that search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN will find them easily. Ranking well with these major search engines have been proven to generate more traffic than any other form of online marketing like PPC advertising or link buying.

Marketing your site or business through SEO is a must for small business, it's a good investment if you are thinking about the long term benefits it can give you. Unfortunately, marketing through Television Ads, Newspapers, etc are beyond the budget of small businesses even if it might yield possible benefits. So what's the solution? The cheapest and most affordable solution is to do search engine optimization yourself. One important reason why small businesses should be doing SEO for themselves is that they know their product better than any SEO company and surely they can do a better job of promoting their own business than they would.

So how do you start learning SEO? There are lots of information and articles regarding search engine optimization. You can start by searching Google for ?introduction to search engine optimization? or ?search engine optimization introduction?. Searching for these phrases can give you tons of information around 4 million results regarding SEO. Another great source of information are article directories like articlewheel.com, ezinearticles.com, or goarticles.com.

Search engine optimization can be classified in two broad categories as:

1. On-page optimization. This pertains to the content and structure of your web site. A well structured web site with quality contents will surely be favored by search engines than those site that are poorly built.

2. Off-page optimization. This is probably the most important category in SEO. Off-page optimization pertains to building links. When building links for your site it is recommended that you get links from quality web sites related to your site.

Doing SEO is not as hard as you might think it is. You don't even need to spend lots of dollars to get to the top search results. All you need to do is to educate yourself with the proper ways to search engine optimization.