Why is SEO Necessary for Any Website?

Written by Rhett Sanders Thursday, 14 April 2011 15:46

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.

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.

See, most people search for products online not knowing where to buy and what company to choose. If you appear on the top of a search listing for a particular keyword it is more likely that they will pick you because people will believe you probably have the best product/service to offer. Doing SEO is not easy, but is all worth the effort for the amount of traffic it can assure you.

Case in point: for example, you had a business that sells old graphic novels and buys extremely rare ones. Someone from a very remote part of the planet has come looking online for a comic series that you happen to sell. He searches on a search engine using a specific keyword, and then voila, because of the near-magical powers of SEO, your website is at the top of the page. He goes to your website and he finds the product, and he gladly buys it because it is extremely cheap. With just a few types of the button, he has come to your website and made business with you. Wonderful, ain't it?

So now you must be thinking to yourself: How is this made possible by a search engine? Well, on the most basic level here's what a search engine like Google would do: they have "spider" codes that sprawl throughout the entire system and crawl on each and every new webpage created each day, analyzing content and data. In doing this they search for the most important words on your site, they keep an index of these particular string of words, and compare it to the other sites that have the same keywords on them. This is where SEO goes. You will be consciously teaching Google's algorithm what you are targeting for.

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.