So you have built yourself a website...that's all there is to it right? ...Wrong.

(sorry)

Having a website built with no SEO is kind of like having a physical shopfront in your backyard. It might be a beautiful shopfront, your products might be the best there is, but no one will benefit from all of that because they can't find you. (Unless you have directly given them your address)

SEO is like taking that shopfront from your backyard, and putting it up in lights in the middle of Chermisde Shopping Centre. 

As a background, here's a little intro to SEO:

Short for search engine optimization, the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user.

A recent Neilsen Survey found that:

• 86% of people have used search engines to find local businesses
• 78% of consumers use the Internet more than they did two years ago
• 52% of consumers use telephone directories less than they did two years ago
• 78% of consumers research a product online before making a purchase using a search engine
• 73% of people prefer to find products and services using search engines than have an advertisement sent to them...If your website doesn't appear in the first few pages of search engine results, you're losing a lot of business.