Final answer:
SEO is the process that improves a website's visibility in search engine results to increase traffic. It focuses on optimizing web content and structure based on search engines' prioritization of factors like advertisements and popularity. Effective use of SEO is crucial for both legitimate and misleading information to gain prominence in search results.
Step-by-step explanation:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process for driving traffic to a Web site by using techniques that improve the site's ranking in search results. Unlike content marketing, social media advertising, or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, SEO involves optimizing the website's content and structure to make it more attractive to search engines. By understanding and leveraging the procedural rules that search engines use to generate results, such as prioritizing paid advertisements, popularity, and web interconnectivity, websites can improve their visibility and rank higher in search results. It is important to utilize these SEO tools effectively, and in a way that promotes factual information, as both legitimate companies and sources of misinformation can use SEO to their advantage.
Learning to use search engines to one's benefit is essential, and using strategies like the SIFT acronym, which stands for the "four moves" of student fact-checkers, can aid in navigating the abundance of information available online.