SEO - a Proper Definition

After a rather animated introductory post, I've now decided to settle down a bit with my usual stuffs, stuffs that I eat, breath and drink on a day to day basis.
After opting to make a career in this field, which is still a rather unexplored and lesser known domain in this part of the world, almost every second day I used to get asked by my over inquisitive friends, 'So what this SEO thing is all about?'
And my trademark answer used to be, 'it is a technique that we use to increase the visibility of a website in the place called web'.
It was so true and yet so stupid as an answer!
True because of its traditional sense of meaning, and stupid because, it is so much more than that!
Optimization of a site in terms of its visibility alone can help a site very little in the long run, unless all the other supporting parameters are well placed in the strategy. So to optimize a website in its true sense, parameters like popularity and sustainability must be taken into account. A SEO campaign can only be successful if all these factors are perfectly analyzed and amalgamated within the strategy.
There have been many examples where sites came in a flash, grabbed the attentions momentarily and vanished like a comet. But it should not be like this. You can impress people with your animated and hyper promising quotations for one or two days, but to survive in the stream for long, you must have the substance within you. And thats why the optimization of popularity and sustainability quotients is a must.
In my next posts I'll try to put a deeper light on these parameters by taking them on.