As the Web grew, search engines like AltaVista, Hotbot and more recently Google have helped countless people find specific information quickly and accurately. Search for a keyword or phrase on your favorite Search Engine and within seconds the engine will search all the pages in its database to find relevant results.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your Web site and CafePress.com Shop on specific keywords in order to obtain "free" traffic to your Web site. This is achieved by showing up in organic search results on the larger search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL.

Organic Search: Describes a search that returns results by indexing pages based on content and keyword relevancy.  Unlike Paid Search, Organic Search is free.

Search engine robots, sometimes called "spiders", "bots" or "crawlers", are programs used by search engines to explore the web, seeking out new pages and checking/updating the Content of known pages. The information that a search engine uses to rank your pages and every other page it holds in its database was found by these Spiders prior to being indexed and added to the database.

After a Search Engine spider or robot has found, downloaded and stored the page another program, called an indexer, processes the page using its own proprietary algorithm.

A search engine indexer will carve the page up into its various components removing all the HTML tags and store links in a queue. The contents of the meta keyword tag, description tag, titles, headings, links, body copy, bold, and italic are analysed. Some indexers compress the page by removing stop words; finally the much cut down page is stored in an online searchable database.