Do you need Oxygen for your lungs to breath? Does Georges Burns need Gracie (my God I am old)? A lot of my web marketing students actually do ask me that question. Every time I hear it, my first answer is usually a smirky one. Now this might not be very professional of me but I cant help it. If you actually have to ask this question, you might still succeed on the Web, but you are miles away and you really need to hit the ebooks to get going on your net venture.

The non-arrogant answer to the first question is of course you do. Here are some key reasons that show why SEO is so critical to success on the Internet:

Major search engines attract more distinct visitors than almost any other Web site. Yahoo! boasts 65 million registered users!

85% of all Internet user sessions involve someone browsing at a search engine*. Your search engine ranking determines a major slice of your site traffic.

Research also shows that users hardly ever go beyond the top 30 search engine rankings for a single search. We estimate that the top 30 results receive over 90% of search traffic*.

Consumers use search engines to locate and buy goods or to research many decisions (such as choosing a vacation destination, medical treatment or election vote)*.

68% of people using search engines use 2 or more words in their search strings*.

This is like the Yellow pagesPeople who look at the Yellow pages are people who have already made a decision to buy. and such is the case most times when people do searches for products on the Internet. People finding your site via search engines are more qualified targets for your products and services because they have actively sought out your site by typing a search phrase directly related to your site content. It's the perfect web site promotion!

Is your site ready and Search Engine Optimized or is it just sitting out there. The World Wide Web contains more than 2.1 billion documents and is growing at the rate of seven million pages per day. You therefore need to be very conscious of your search engine positioning. If you're not listed within the first 20 or 30 search engine rankings, you lose traffic, no matter how many engines you submitted your site to. The secret is to use search engine positioning techniques that will rank you higher than your competitors.