Search Engine Optimisation has become a necessary marketing strategy for any online business. For the past couple of years, there has been a tremendous growth in the SEO industry. Any good online marketing campaign will have SEO included. But how important really is Search Engine Optimisation? How does ranking higher on a search engine improve your sales?

When you think about it, it’s probably right. We ourselves have tried searching for stuff in search engines and the pages we would most likely open are the ones at the top. It would be very rare to find users who would go out of their way and look for results farther than the first two pages of the web search result. It has been well documented that search engine traffic make up about half of the internet’s total traffic. Being able to tap into that traffic is what makes SEO so valuable.

There have been many analyses for the traffic numbers brought on by SEO. One study states that the first month a site appeared on the second page of a search engine result, traffic increased to five times the traffic of the previous month. In the second month, the traffic was nine times greater. When the site finally appeared in the first page of the search results, the number of unique visitors tripled. And this number would then be doubled by the second month. And with respect to the sales, it was increased by 42 percent for the first month an nearly twice that for the second month.

The numbers are outstanding. It’s unimaginable how a business found farther than the first three pages of the search result would fare – especially in a field that has many other businesses competing. With these statistics, for your online business to thrive, you’d do well investing in SEO.

However, with the popularity of SEO, many black-hat SEO companies have also appeared. Since SEO mainly focuses on keywords and links, these companies have made strategies that enable less than deserving sites to be ranked up higher on the results. They take advantage of a search engine’s robotic nature and look for loopholes in its algorithm.

Google has made serious efforts to crack down on these SEOs who perform shady techniques. Some of these practices include: creating “link-farms”, which are a network of sites that link to each other to increase popularity, and creating bait for search engines – visible or hidden keywords and links that are added to the sole purpose of increasing search engine value.

There have been sites that have been banned because of this reason. And many businesses have paid the price because it takes a lot of effort to repair websites that have fallen prey to these SEOs.

SEO is indeed important in online businesses but one must be aware of SEO consultants performing unethical practices. Invest in a good SEO if you want to have success in the internet business.