If, as a Internet marketer, you expect to survive and be found , you need to learn how to: 1) place your pages in the high-traffic core, and 2) achieve a high ranking in the major search engines. Otherwise, your sites will be like little islands in the sea: remote, inaccessible, and forgotten.

This means you are solely relying on people typing in your URL in the command lines of their browsers, and this only works if your site is well-known. The days of serendipitous surfers and “accidental traffic” stumbling onto your site are over. On this “new” Internet made up of billions of Web pages, site owners must use every tool available to them to attract visitors. And even then, you face stiff competition.

I only consider a ranking to be a listing within the top 30, because studies have shown that must searchers do not keep clicking through past the third page. In fact, most searchers do not even click-through to the second page. Therefore, a #10 ranking is much more valuable than #27, and #64 is pretty much worthless.

Now, many other search engines do display more than 10 results per page. So, in this case, should you be happy if you are within the top 120? No, because most users still don’t appear to click below #30, no matter how many listings are on a page.

For example, if a user performs a query in Google for “cheese” and your site is not listed, then no matter how many types of cheese you sell, or how great your cheesy recipes are, that user will not and cannot arrive at your site. For a search engine to deliver a visitor to your site, the visitor must first click on a search result for your site. Often, owners of large sites that have been on the Web for a while will discover that they have a very large number of search engine referrals. This is because they actually have rankings even before they begin optimizing pages. However, many of these “accidental” rankings will most likely be on keywords that are rarely sought by users. This is due to the fact that the most highly queried keywords are also the most competitive. In other words, it is highly unlikely that you would find accidental rankings for “MP3.” The difference between “accidental” ranking and
SEO is that SEO is the deliberate optimization of search results in the pursuit of traffic.

The whole point of SEO is to increase traffic to a site. But not just traffic. You want qualified users who are seeking content, product or service that your site can provide. Therefore, it is important to remember what a ranking actually is. Many times SEO professionals will be overjoyed with a top 10 ranking that a site has achieved, and the site owner (rightfully) says, “So, what? I still don’t have any sales!” A ranking doesn’t directly equal traffic, and traffic doesn’t directly equal sales.
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