The way people search for information has changed dramatically since the inception of Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Over 80 percent of Internet users is using some form of Search Engine in their daily website activities. It is also a fact that if your business or organization is not on the first page, or even in the top ten, it is unlikely that people will ever find you. This is a major challenge for many businesses, and with the ever increasing number of websites coming online things will get even more challenging in the future.

As you can see in the chart below, Google is the dominant player in the search market with an estimated market share of over 85 percent. Although Google is a market darling in terms of its business success, having such a large market share (or should we say ‘monopoly’) is creating some real challenges for business owners around the world.

Every website owner wants her/his website to rank high in the search engine results, but how exactly can this be achieved? The answer is that there are so many variables (many of them unknown) that ranking high (or Search Engine Optimization) is part art and part science.

Google (and the other Search providers) have built their business on delivering relevant results for their search customers. Finding what you are looking for is the most important factor when using a search engine. Google is making an assessment of what information your website contains (based on titles, keywords, headings etc) through ‘Spiders’ - a piece of software that roams the web looking for (new) content. Because this is a fully automated system and computers are by nature ‘dumb’ what happens if your website does not get included in the Google database and therefore will not show up in the Google results or show up on page 89?

This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in. In essence, SEO is a collection of techniques and best practices that will improve your chances of success of ranking high in the search engine results. One of the most obvious things you can do is to develop and maintain a website that contains useful information for your visitors, is easy to navigate and can be easily ‘read’ by the search engine spiders (being search engine friendly)

Google is such a powerful force and is used by some many of your (potential) customers that optimizing your site to be found is a 'no-brainer' and a good investment in your business success.