Search engine optimization is any action meant to increase your sites visibility among the search engines. The ones at the very top like Google, Yahoo and Bing offer free traffic for your sites especially if you can appear among the top ten (the first page in the search engine results page (SERP).
A site without visitors is like a classroom with a teacher but no students. It doesn’t matter how good the teacher is but with no students this effort is wasted. If you have no visitors you might as well be writing for yourself.
Any guru out there worth his salt will tell you that the search engines offer the most relevant traffic. It therefore falls on every site administrator’s lot to optimize their site for the search engines.
You can either hire a qualified specialist to do the work for you or learn the basics or do it yourself. I would recommend the latter as you will gain some good information and experience which will prove very useful in the long run SEO takes effort and I won’t insult your logic by telling you it is easy. But once you learn the basics the rest is simple. Know that if you need good results online the first step is search engine optimization.