Going back into the history of search engine optimization it started around the later part of the 1990's when the search engines started cataloging the web. In the process webmasters misused and abused the search engines, search algorithms and thus ranking for non relevant search terms in their content. In order to eliminate the various abuses, the search engines algorithms started to improve and getting more sophisticated in order to bring the best and most relevant content to the web searcher.
The viability of Search engine optimization are the processes of improving acknowledgment and visibility of web pages, websites and blogs for search engines in the natural or unpaid version of the internet libraries. Spiders will crawl web pages and blogs to collect all the information about the page, in other words it will collect all the following info about a page; words, photos, links and relevant text. The information collected by the spiders is than indexed in another platform where more detailed information about the pages is extracted. At this point it is the relevant part of search engine optimization that has to be focused on as it is being used by search engines to bring the best and most relevant information to the web searcher.
It is fair to say that due to the search engines continues complex algorithm that is put together by various groups of skilled people the average person on the vast internet does not think or cannot think as these group of people, search engine optimization is there to decrease the internet sphere between the search engine engineers and the average computer skilled person looking for relevant content or information in their web search.