Why Search Engine Optimization is Important For Driving Traffic to your Website

In Today's age, if you want to be heard, or your website visited, or your products sold, one of the most exciting ways is to be indexed by the major search engines. With over 60 Billion and counting requests made to search engines every month for something they are looking for, the opportunities are literally endless for your website to be visible to this mind boggling amount of people and be part of the largest marketplace in the history of mankind!

So being listed on a search engine results page for a particular query is want you'd want - so visitors who use search engines, can view your websites and see your pages. There is a couple of things we should mention to you here. Firstly, when we talk about search engines, we are mostly talking about Google, with the lion share of the search engine market, especially in the english speaking world.

The other major players being Microsoft's Bing and Yahoo Search. However, as all of the major search engines improve their searching abilities, they are all using similiar techniques(or copying Google's ones!) to give there users the most relevant results possible to their users' search queries.

Secondly, your website being known by the search engines like Google is quite simple and easy. But being listed on the FIRST PAGE for a keyword or a phrase requires a bit more work. Being frank, if your website will be listed on the 683rd page for a search result - no one is going to see it! Most users don't go past the first page and few go past the 3rd. It might sound cumbersome and you might be wondering "How on Earth will I get my website on the first page?". Well it can be done for a specific set of keywords or phrases, that your website be listed on the front page. How?...Welcome to the exciting and ever-changing world of SEO or Search Engine Optimization!

Is it really worth it though? To put the effort in or pay a professional to rank well on a search engine? We believe, it is not only a cost-effective marketing strategy, but you can potentially receive tens of thousands of daily visitors to your website if not more! And you don't only receive visitors that will not buy your products or not be interested in what you have to say but people who are genuinely interested in your product or service. They after all, did go to the trouble of searching for the keyword or phrase that you ranked well for! Not only this, but a study by Yahoo! In 2007 estimated that for every dollar spent on online advertisement, it drove $6 of sales in offline, traditional, brick and mortar stores!

SEO is then, optimizing your webpages so they rank well in organic search engine results. Organic search engine results? Yes organic! You see there is an easier way for your website to be listed highly, on the first page, for a search engine result. And that is through paid advertising, wherby, you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. These sponsored ads, as they are called, can be seen as smaller results on the side of a Google Results page.

However these can be cost-prohibitive and don't have as great exposure. Nevertheless, they make an important part of a complete internet marketing campaign. Sponsored- ad marketing campaigns are called pay-per-click campaigns.

The organic or natural search results then, are the larger results that take up the majority of the page, which Google decides is relevant to a user's search query. Google provides these organic search results free of charge, so you are not charged every time someone selects them, unlike the paid results.

To help you understand the almost limitless potential of SEO here are some facts to get you pumped!

• On a typical day, there are over 4500 searches every second! (Jan 2009, ComScore)

• Google owns approximately 65% of the Search Market Share (Jan 2009, ComScore)

• 80% of search requests are informational in nature, with the rest being navigational or transactional (http://ist.psu.edu/faculty_pages/jjansen/academic/pubs/jansen_user_intent.pdf) (Queensland University of technology)

• 30% of online transactions were completed more than a day after the initial search. (http://searchenginewatch.com/3626363)

• 74% of those surveyed used search engines to find local businesses. (http://searchengineland.com/survey-search-now-top-resource-for-local-information-12396)

• 62% of searchers select a search result on the first page and 90% in the first three pages. (iProspect and Jupiter Research)

• 36% of search engine users assume that a company listed among the top results on a search engine results page (SERP) is one of the leaders in its field. (Same reference as above)

• One study discovered that the first ten search engine results received 89.71% of all click-though rates, these are the ones typically listed on the first page of search results. The next ten received 4.37%, the 3rd page received 2.42% and the 5^th page received 1.07%