SEO Capabilities in the Wild. SEO is, quite simply, an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, and that is all it is. It is not a game of subterfuge with users or search crawlers; rather, it is a process of taking known rules of how search engines work and building it into a plan to improve upon the visibility you might have if you did nothing at all. There are about 1.5 billion websites in the world today, with most of them completely unaware of their SEO missteps. Yet, search engines still have to figure out how to understand these websites without SEO, so they may get a small amount of search traffic. If that small traffic is not acceptable to you, SEO is your only answer. Make sure that your freelance SEO knows what search engine recommendations are. To execute an SEO strategy of any type, it is important to at least have a basic understanding of how search engines work.
SEO is simply the idea of optimizing for this reality in whatever form is necessary to improve the visibility prospects of a website.