Let us be honest about this once and for all – SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is as important to your website as building the site in the first place. Without SEO, your promising products and services will not go anywhere online – you won’t ever have an audience. A conscious attempt at pursuing your target traffic online is the only way you will get noticed among billions and billions of websites, so SEO is severely important to your business.

That being said, is this the only way to reach people online? Of course, there are other ways you can try – you may append your websites on your business’ TV appearances, or put a website classifieds on the local newspaper, but the traffic this produces is arguably only 5% of what you can gain from SEO.

Depending on your market, you can rake in as much as 100,000 unique views in a month. Imagine that! 100,000 individual customers looking to buy your product. And they do not even know that your website or your business existed beforehand. This staggering statistic alone is reason why you should rely on SEO as the perfect online marketing tool.

Imagine this scenario: you had a company that sells rare comics and graphic novels. A person from some distant part of the world was searching for a graphic novel that your company is selling, but he doesn’t even know that your company exists. He goes into Google, types in the keyword for the product he’s looking for, and there, on the first page of the search results is a link to your website. Just by typing a few words, a possible businesss transaction is made, and that’s a wonderful thing for your business to have, isn’t it?

You may be wondering, then, “How do search engines analyze websites?” Well, most SEO experts can only guess how search engine companies do it (as search engine algorithms are very closely guarded secrets to prevent exploitation by hackers), but the main analogy is this: search engines have little programs called “spiders” that crawl on the content of all webpages, which analyzes all of the site’s content and metadata.

Essentially, all search engines perform the following tasks: first, they search the Internet for a string of important words. Next, they keep an index of where they find these words and how often they find these words on specific parts of the Internet. Lastly, they allow users to gain access to this index by letting them search specific words as well.