For those who are venturing out into the world of building a business online, SEO is everything (unless of course you use Pay-Per Click marketing, but that's a whole different ball game).
Fewer and fewer companies are relying on billboards and television to advertise their products as the benefits of these cannot be easily measured.
Instead, companies are turning to the internet, as you can now measure every metric to do with your website, including what keywords they typed in to get there, which pages they visited and how long they spent on there.
For those that are unaware, SEO stand for Search Engine Optimisation.
Businesses live and die by their ability to make the search engines love them.
Imagine if you owned a second-hand car website that ranked number 1 in Google for the search term 'buy used cars'.
Think you could find a way to make money from the millions of visitors you'd get each month? We have now come to a point where journalistic websites and newspapers will deliberately avoid bad-mouthing Google for fear of what they might do to their website's ranking position.
It's ironic that the publications that helped Google essentially take over the internet world are now running in scared.
Some companies' products are decided upon purely by keywords.
Using Google's keyword tool we can view keywords' search data and competing websites.
By finding a 'gap in the market' people start up websites/businesses.
Their aim is to fill that market gap and to dominate that area of the search engine rankings.