ON THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF SEARCH ENGINE RANKING TO THE SUCCESS OF YOUR WEB-BASED BUSINESS

For most of us, the search engine ranking of our sites for our keyword phrases is the main measure of success of our websites.
In fact, the number of responses to our "Call to Action" is the real measure of success.
Of course, if no-one notices your site because of low search-engine ranking, then you will not get any business from the website unless you pay for "pay per click" advertising on the search engine results pages.  If your budget is large, you can get very fast results from paid advertising. I have noticed though that many of the websites on the paid adverts section of Google results tend to be very poorly made and have poor usability to boot.

All aspects of website design need to be addressed to gain the full potential from a website, and all too often it is the search engine optimisation angle which is neglected. This neglect is largely because the subject is poorly understood by many website owners.

At the bottom of this page is a link to a very informative page by Jill Whalen. "The end result is that no two people will see the same rankings, making them an even more worthless measurement than they already are."
"Rankings don't equal conversions or sales."
"What should you be measuring instead? The things that matter, of course—the targeted traffic, but even more important than that—the conversions and sales."

Jill Whalen, CEO and founder of High Rankings, a search marketing firm outside of Boston, and co-founder of SEMNE, a New England search marketing networking organization, has been performing SEO since 1995.
Jill is the host of the High Rankings Advisor search engine marketing newsletter. http://www.highrankings.com/advisor/

5 Reasons Why Rankings Are A Poor Measure Of Success

http://searchengineland.com/080131-071244.php
http://searchengineland.com/080131-071244.php