Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the art of taking a website and pushing it up the ranks of the major search engines. SEO first emerged in the late 90s as powerful search engines such as Google were coming to the forefront. Web masters soon realized that in order to succeed online they needed to work to have their websites in the top ranks of search results.
Promoting or "optimizing" a website was at first a simple and direct matter, involving only a few well known factors. The first generation of search engines relied on what are known as metatags to categorize the content of a web page. A metatag, however, did not have to relate in any way to a website's content. This soon resulted in search results that had nothing to do with what the user was looking for. This was a result of both bad design and abuse of the system.