SEO means search engine optimization. SEO specialists all around the world don't try to optimize search engines. They try to optimize web sites for search engines. This is like the name of the movie "Lady Killer." You can't understand, until you see the movie, if it is about a killer who kills ladies or a killer who is a lady. In New York, Search Optimization doesn't have different rules from the rest of the world. However we try to play the game in the limits of ethics here in New York.
The most important thing for a web site to appear on the result pages of a search engine is to explain its content and quality to the search engine indexers. These indexers are like giant library catalogues. They try to contain every word written in all the web pages online. To do this they connect to the web sites with regular intervals and copy everything overwriting the old content. The movement of the search engine indexer is like spider knitting it's net because once it enters a site it follows all the outgoing links doing the same thing on every site it enters. For this reason people call the applet of the search engines that do the browsing, spiders. When a person visits a web site he or she doesn't enter the site literally. In reality, he or she calls the content from the web site to his or her own screen. Contrary to common belief and vivid imagination of people, search engines do exactly the same thing with a little more speed. They index everything according to words, word groups, domain names, relevance, rankings and many more criteria. When a keyword is searched they send the query to the index and after the results are filtered through an algorithm they appear on our screen. This search process lasts less than 0.2 seconds.
Search engine optimization companies take the content of the existing site and make it more search engine friendly using codes, tags and other tools. Another thing the search engines check is the pages linking to the sites they index. If many people gave a site as a reference, then that site must have valuable information so in the search results, it appears in front of other pages having the same keywords. These links are called back links. Search engine optimizers also try to create back links to increase the rank of their clients' pages.
Optimizing the web site content and creating back links are the main tasks of SEO companies. After the improvements in social networks like Facebook and Twitter another task of using these social networks started to be undertaken by SEO firms.
There are SEO companies all around the world and they all work to get their clients higher rankings on the search engine result pages. Because of the international structure of the Internet they don't necessarily serve local clients. A New York Search Optimization company may have clients in Rome or a search engine optimization company in Paris may serve clients from Utah.