More visitors to your website somehow meant you were doing great—even if you weren’t making money, or even if those visitors left after viewing just one page on your entire website. Sometimes, they were only visiting because they were promised that if they did, they’d be sent over $20 worth of free stuff at no obligation.

No wonder the next thing that happened was the dot-bomb fallout. Dinosaurs walked the Web. It took the equivalent of a meteor to wipe out a species that, in this case, deserved extinction with all due speed.

We’ve long since moved beyond just the click as the measure of value on the Internet.

Small wonder, then, that search has become the fastest-growing sector of the Internet, which in itself is the fastest-growing channel in history. Search is about relevance, and above all, about relevant results. When a searcher types “digital camera” into the query box, they do not and should not expect to be delivered a bunch of results pointing to film cameras, or Polaroid cameras, or pinhole cameras, or camera obscura.

They want, and expect, to see relevant results for digital cameras.

There’s a tremendous upside to this for anyone who runs a website that has anything to do with digital cameras. That searcher has just raised his hand. He’s prequalified himself as someone interested in digital cameras, and is certainly more than open to visiting sites that have content concerning digital cameras. And he wants it now. This digital camera content could be about buying them, selling them, reviews of different digital camera models, news about digital cameras, instructions and tips for using digital cameras, repairing digital cameras—the possibilities are wide open.

If you’re running a website that has something to do with digital cameras, that’s where SEO comes into the picture. If you were running the only site on the entire Internet about digital cameras, SEO wouldn’t be a big deal. It wouldn’t even be necessary because your site would be the only “findable” site for that digital camera query. However, with hundreds of billions of sites out there—and more every day—no matter how obscure or arcane your website is, chances are you have more than a healthy amount of competition. Heck, more than 2 million pages in Google’s index are about beekeeping.

Without SEO, you’re more than likely to be a really tiny needle in a really gigantic haystack. With a well-optimized site, you can capture qualified traffic and come pretty close to the marketing ideal of sending the right message to the right person at the right time: When they raise their hand and say, “Hey! Over here! I need information about beekeeping. Now!” This is what a searcher is effectively doing when he types “beekeeping” into a search query box.

A well-executed SEO plan will help you to capture this qualified traffic—to reach searchers with an expressed interest in what you’re offering, or saying, or doing—while at the same time saving you time, effort, and above all, money. SEO can create marketing nirvana: the right message to the right person at the right time.

Yes, there are ways of targeting advertising, particularly online, to reach people potentially interested in those digital cameras or portable beehives. But how can you know if they’re really interested in what you’ve got to say, or sell? Are they trying to learn to take better pictures with a camera they already own? In that case, all those expensive ads touting a specific make or model of camera are likely to be wasted on them. But a well-optimized site has a much better chance of being front-and-center when they’re looking to actually buy, or to research, a purchase. At the same time, a poorly optimized site is a proverbial tree falling in the woods when they’re searching, but not finding you.

That old joke about the main part of a job notwithstanding, however, there’s plenty more to SEO than simply showing up. Search engine optimization involves keeping a number of balls in the air, and constantly tweaking and calibrating them to deliver relevance to the search engines, in order to not only appear on search results pages, but also to appear high enough up in those rankings to be found by a searcher. SEO also means delivering relevance to searchers above and beyond those results, so when they do click and arrive on your website, they quickly find the information they expected to find.

That’s because any single one of the billions of other sites on the Web are just a single-click away.

When what’s on your site, and the way in which that content is optimized, is relevant to a searcher’s query, it’s a win-win. The object isn’t just to show up in search results, even if that’s certainly part of the equation.

Your goal isn’t just to get a searcher to click—although that’s not chopped liver, either.

The ultimate goal is to meet, if not to exceed, searchers’ expectations so that they’ll stick around a while, and so that they’ll buy, or register, or subscribe, or any of the myriad other potential objectives a site owner might have.

It’s, therefore, incumbent on every website owner to ensure that once a searcher clicks on a search engine result and arrives at his site, that the page actually addresses the searcher’s need and provides an answer to his query. Ideally, the searcher finds what he or she is looking for on the same page that shows up in the search result.

This is why many businesses develop content strategies around their offerings. A digital camera merchant, for example, might provide buying guides, or articles about different types of digital cameras and what various technical specifications mean or cost. This not only increases the likelihood of appearing in the search results for a variety of queries around the term “digital camera,” but also ensures the site addresses the searchers need on a variety of levels beyond merely “click here to buy.”