You can drive a car. You can drive a tractor. You can even drive yourself crazy worrying about your kids. But one of the most important things you can drive in business today is traffic to your website. On the surface this seems pretty simple. You build a pretty website, post it and wait for the money to start rolling. Unfortunately, it is anything but simple.

Driving steady, sustainable and meaningful traffic to your website that can then be converted into paying customers is vital to business success in today’s highly connected market. The best way to drive traffic to your website is to rank at the top of the search engine results page. And, the best way to garner that coveted top spot is to have a well thought out, measurable and adaptive SEO strategy.

The Internet is massive. There are likely to be 212 billion total searches conducted from Google, Bing and Yahoo by the end of 2014. And, with 5 billion pages indexed on Google, only those businesses willing to invest the time and money in SEO will rise to the top. The good news is that businesses that do make the investment, and find the right SEO expert are rewarded with a strong ROI.

The need for SEO is driven largely by two factors. The Internet is a living being and changes every day because new websites are added, new content is uploaded and new searches are conducted. Additionally, the search engine algorithms change frequently to stay ahead of people trying to game the system and to strive to return ever more relevant content to a search query.

Your business success depends in part on the success of your SEO strategy. So plan well and learn as you go.