Search engine optimization is something that nobody with an online presence can afford to ignore.

The main reason for this emerges from fact that well over 75 per cent of traffic that any website receives will usually come from search engines. Like it or not, search engines are still favorite method used by most in seeking for information and web.

Research has also clearly shown that most people rarely go beyond first two pages of search results. What this means is that your raking, or order in which you appear in most search engine popular searches will make a huge difference in traffic that you end up receiving at your website or blog.

This is where search engine optimization comes in. It is simply doing various things to ensure that your website or blog features as high up as possible in search engine results in your particular area of interest.

The other important aspect that most people forget is that search engines themselves are in competition with other search engines to provide most detailed and informative content in all searches that are done at their sites. Everything search engines do in determining rankings are driven by their desire to better other competing search engines.

Understanding this motivation in search engines is important because quite often search engines have been portrayed as having taken decisions that are not understandable and which may appear not to make any sense to those whose search engine rankings drop suddenly and seemingly without any warning.

That model worked fairly well in 1996 but if you are still following this strategy in 2005, you are effectively non-existent on internet. Why? There are now dozens of search engines and directories and somewhere in area of 80 million websites on www. Still think folks are finding you?

So how does average consumer find your company? They type in a couple of keywords into a search engine and are then presented with thousands of your competitors’ websites.

Let’s say your company is Walt’s Widgets. You have a pretty website with pictures of your widgets, a nice “about us” page, maybe some employee pictures and a picture of your beautiful building. It all looks good on website but when Mr. Consumer types “widgets” into Google, poor old Walt’s Widgets is on page 620 of search results!

How can this be? Your site is not optimized for search engines and is not being indexed by search engine spiders and robots so you aren’t being seen!

Research has shown that average surfer will only review first three pages of search results and will not drill down any deeper. If you are on page 62, you effectively don’t exist!