You might have been hearing a little bit in the past few years about how search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective Internet marketing strategies. The truth is that SEO marketing, a specific kind of search engine marketing, is in fact incredibly effective.

“But how?” you wonder.

Let’s start with the basics. First of all, 93% of all online experiences begin at a search engine, which results in around 100 billion global searches each month. Of these searches, 75% never even go past the first page of search results. More specifically, Google’s first ranked result gets around 18.2% of the clicks, and the second gets 10.1% while third gets 7.2%. Fourth receives 4.8% of clicks, and all other positions only account for 2% of click through traffic.

Naturally, this means that unless you’re one of the top ten ranked search results out of the potentially millions of other results, most people aren’t going to make it to your website. SEO’s goal is to increase a site’s online visibility through an improvement in these search engine rankings through the employment of a number of tactics and strategies that cater to what factors search engines consider most important.

The amount of searches that people conduct everyday online continues to grow, which means that SEO becomes more and more important each and every day. According to data from comScore, there were just under 204 billion searches from desktops alone in March 2013, while mobile searches grew between March and December by 113.1 million.

Basically, if you hope to make any money through your website, you’re going to need SEO. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments. Get more on this here.