Have you ever stopped to think how much time is taken up over the course of a year just by that niggling thought at the back of your mind;

"Am I on the first page?"

I bet it if you counted up all the times you did it you would be looking at hours, maybe even days! But are search engines really that important to the success of your website? No, they're not - here's why..

1. They waste your time.

Admit it - you spend hours just seeing where in the rankings you appear when you could be spending that time improving your business, adding more great content to your website or following up on those sales leads.

2. They owe you nothing.

There is nothing more dangerous than your website's traffic and hence your business' revenue being dependent on one type of resource (i.e. search engine) or worse still one particular search engine. They can change the way they list and rank sites over night - they are not indebted to provide you with consistent traffic. Just look at the latest sweeping changes made by Google - businesses literally went under as a result of being solely dependent on one primary source of visitors.

3. They sap your soul.

There can be nothing more disheartening than seeing your ranking in the search engines either fall from page 1 to page 99 or disappear completely. People can get caught up in a mesmerising dance with the search engines constantly changing their site to pander to the needs of the search engines. Remember this - high ranking in the search engines does not equal profit.

What brings you profit is a good product or service, an excellent website with valuable content and a great conversion rate of visitor into customer. 99% of website owners think their problem is lack of visitors - it's not, it's lack of understanding of what it takes to convert the current visitors into customers. Only worry about your search engine ranking if you've got all other elements of your business and your website as close to perfection as they can be.

3.5 They're not the be all and end all.

There are much better ways to attract visitors via the web than search engines. Website owners who really know their stuff and have invested 100s of hours marketing their website (or got experts like magnet4web to do it for them!) attract over 80% of their visitors via sources other than search engines - directories, links etc.

If a search engine goes bust or changes the way it ranks you and you rely on it too heavily you can suffer in a big way. If the vast majority of your traffic comes from many, many links then you can still continue to thrive.

Remember - traffic from search engines should be treated as an additional source of visitors to your website - not the only source.

Michael Cheney is Author of The Website Marketing BibleTM. Take the Free 7-Part Course "Internet Marketing Made Easy" and get your free sampler of 'The Bible' here: http://www.websitemarketingbible.com/marketing/