Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the practice of making it easy for Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask or others to analyze or "index" the pages on your website. The more relevant a page's content seems to be for an individual user's search query, the higher the ranking on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

On Google, for example, a high ranking for "Bill's Vintage Comic Books" means that Bill's site will be near the top of the listings on the left-hand side of the results page (the so-called "natural listings"). This is in contrast to Paid Search or SEM (Search Engine Marketing) listings, which are the sponsored results. To use Google again as an example, the sponsored results are on the right-hand side of the page.

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