SEO is all of the above.

In practical terms its the ability to get a higher rank and virtually the most important thing if your going to do business on the web.

SEO a very important practice to increase the traffic through search engines and require Patience

Its true that optimization doesn't have to be complex, but to say that it "isn't complex" would also be incorrect. The act of optimization can be a range of levels. Basic optimization can cover just the barest of needs such as on page content optimized for a few key phrases, matching titles and meta's and calling it done.

On the other hand there's so much more to it and every aspect of linking one page to another must be addressed. You have to take into account your competition, market conditions, advertising streams, social networking/marketing, brand awareness, image development and protection...and on and on. Optimization isn't just grabbing keywords and building websites around them. (although I sometimes wish it was, clicking my ruby slippers)

Most manipulators work on factors that are external to the site. An SEO expert will focus on the website before concentrating on the external factors.

A keyphrase development strategy should be deployed at the onset of launching new web sites. It makes it easier to rank the webpages in the long run when the pages are already heading in the right direction SEO-wise. I usually suggest starting new websites with a theme of five or six related but substantially different keyphrases (that will be offered in the SERPs as results for potentially hundreds of keyword combinations and variations). This original keyphrase list then expands; eventually to include every conceivable keyphrase that will attract a qualified visitor (and still remains pertinent to the specific market sector).

Fred, is that a pen name? How's the fishing?

@douglasmartin09

Read this first. This can clear you out what is SEO.

I have read this stream and what I am seeing is some people talking about basic SEO activities and others talking about more in depth SEM initiatives. Everyone can get up to speed on some basic SEO techniques that will give you good rankings but to conduct SEM initiatives you are talking about a lot of planning and taking into consideration the overall marketing plans of the enterprise as a whole. As an example, I worked for a company that used a crappy CSM software (it was free so they loved it) to build a website but they barely added any meta-tags on the home page and none on any of the other pages of the site. Doing some basic SEO processes (adding more specific meta tags, rewriting page content to include keywords), I was able to dramatically affect the page rankings for the site. But because the company's reticence in establishing a marketing budget of any kind, I was unable to formulate an SEM strategy that would have increased the possibility of the website generating serious leads and/or sales.

One of my clients was the polar opposite of yours. They were willing to spend money on PPC and ad streams but ran their site on a crappy and EXPENSIVE ($4000 at a discount) CMS!! After spending a year fighting that thing I convinced them to move everything to Joomla and man has that site improved from bottom to top. Every page has its own titles/tags, sef urls, managing is a snap and layout is fantastic (with 2-3 months invested)... They are now ranking for singular keywords they had never ranked for in the past. Organic traffic has risen to over 75% overall traffic where it was 65% from PPC/PPI.

So for me I was able to formulate a marketing strategy but couldn't combine that with good organics and that was frustrating. Thank god they listened to me.

Is internet marketing and SEO is different? If yes then, what’s the primary difference between them?