Unless you plan on attracting customers by word of mouth or other forms of advertising, SEO is usually the most important component of a successful website. "Search Engine Optimization" is the science of attracting search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo among others, so that they rank the content of your website as highly as possible.

This might sound easy but it is actually highly complex and involves a lot of different elements to make it work. Being ranked on any page further than page 2 becomes fairly useless for the busines. Although some people think that just having a website will automatically set you up to be found through internet searches, that's just not the way it works! The TV ads stating that just contacting them will result in a great business website in an hour is not exactly in keeping with the reality of web design and effective SEO!

Google is the best known search engine, with about 90% of the search engine market, followed by Bing at a little under 4%. Because of this marked discrepancy, "Let's Google it" has become a general expression in the English language.

The fact to keep in mind is that ranking is not instantaneous, no matter how well the web designer adds in all the required parameters. It may take up to as much as 3 to 6 months for a new website to "rank", depending on the competition of the keywords for which you're wanting your business to rank.