If you have read the book "The Long Tail" by Chris Anderson, you will be able to understand what I mean. If not, let me explain to you briefly.

In the past, Internet turns the industry into an information age, as it makes almost all information to be readily accessible as long as you have an Internet connection. When the emergence of search engines like Google and Yahoo!, they have make information access so easy that anyone who knows how to use a keyboard can search for any information that they want.

But now, we are talking more about the Recommendation Age. General information is no longer hard to access, but good information/products/services need to be recommended. Just look at Amazon.com. They have developed a brilliant system whereby when someone wants to buy a book, Amazon always recommend few other books with its "People who buy this also bought" recommendation system. This simple recommendation system results in dramatic increase in sales.

Another example is voting. How many times have you seen websites employ this system of voting for the best posts or products? When it comes to blogging, a particular blogger will recommend other people products and thus result in affiliate sales. You see, all these are recommendation at work.

So why is search engine optimization so important for businesses? It is because search engines are the most trusted and biggest "recommendator" on the Internet! When you do a search on a particular topic on Google, do you trust the information of the first 2 pages more than the information on the 10th page?

It is extremely important to get into prominent pages on search engines so that when your prospects search for your products or services, you will want to search engines like Google to recommend you by having you on their first few pages!

Just imagine if your competitors are all on top pages of the major search engines but you are not, do you think that you have lost out on a big opportunity to convince your prospects about your services/products?

For those who still think search engine optimization is not useful to your business, I seriously think that they need to reconsider it again.