Search Engine Optimization is the buzzword in World Wide Web. When getting a website made, you should hire a professional who is aware of the technicalities of SEO while also having a firm grasp on design essentials. Remember, the ultimate purpose of your website is to make you discoverable on the internet. A beautiful website with Flash animations and images can’t do that. However, relevant content optimized for search engines will.

“1. SEO strategies can take your business, products, and services to your target audience and prospective customers”

In order to understand the importance of an SEO friendly website, we first need to ask a very important question…

… What is an SEO friendly website?

An SEO friendly website, as the name suggests, is a site that is constructed in a manner that helps it rank high on search engines. Everything about it – from the URLs to the content – is adjusted in a way that makes it easily discoverable to the audience.

Following are the features of a website that are optimised according to the requirement of search engines.

• Keywords Rich Content
• SEO Friendly Navigation
• SEO friendly URLs and image file names
• W3C Validation, etc.

Now that we have a fair understanding of an SEO friendly website, let’s see why it’s so important. Here’s a list of reasons that I think makes SEO marketing or campaigns extremely essential for websites.

1. SEO strategies can take your business, products, and services to your target audience and prospective customers – the people who are looking for exactly what you have to offer them.
2. Brand Awareness – Visibility – Discoverability. The three things that you expect out of your website can be achieved through SEO. According to studies, 8 out of 10 conversions take place when people discover what they are looking for through search engines.
3.  Web SEO utilization is sitting at 39% as we speak now, up from 19% in 2007, for all e-commerce websites. Your competitors are not sitting ideally, waiting to see what the others will do!
4. Get ROI from your website. SEO marketing strategies work for you 24×7, 365 days unlike traditional TV, radio and newspaper commercials or ads.
5. An exodus from print media to internet marketing is what is trending in the business world today. Apparently an estimated $25 Billion has moved out of print media to be invested into web and SEO marketing.
6. Internet and SEO marketing is grossing an estimated 15% of all media and advertising expenses. So, if your website isn’t optimised according to the requirements of search engines, it’s high time for you to upgrade.
7. Contrasted with 15% for all sponsored ads and PPC (Pay Per Click), organic search engine results are 85% of all end users clicks.
8. E-commerce alone has seen an incredible growth of 17% in the recent years. SEO is a must for all these websites to be visible to their target market.
9. Nearly 250 million searches happen each day on Google alone. This number is only moving upwards since the introduction of 3G services and smart phones. Without SEO, the internet world will be in a complete mess!

We are living in a world today where everything we want is served on a platter. Call it Einstein’s nightmare, but people like to live in the virtual world these days. As a businessman, it’s important not to lose sight of this fact for even a moment. In this cut-throat competition, if we fall back on delivering the best in the most effective manner, we will be out of the picture in no time.

SEO brings us closer to our consumers and we can’t let go of the opportunity to do so. Its prominence is only growing day by day and a website that is not SEO friendly will be lost in the chaos of the cyber world. So, till the time internet giants like Google come up with another mystic algorithm, we have to follow the rules of Search Engine Optimization to move ahead in our game.

Author Bio:

Sabrina Matthew is the Creative Director at Art Attackk, Addictive Media’s Digital Design Division located in New Delhi. She has an eye for detail and is passionate about all things related to design, a field she has been associated with for over 5 years. She has done her graduation in Mass Communication from Delhi University and has a Postgraduate Diploma in Multimedia and Design from ICFAI University. Her hobbies include poetry, sketching, and art and craft. She’s an enthusiastic environmentalist and also champions for animal rights.