Rebecca Lieb is a marketing super-maven. I first met Rebecca when she was writing about search, as well as interactive marketing and advertising, as ClickZ’s Editor-in-Chief. The company I founded way back in 1996, search engine marketing firm iProspect (sold to Isobar, a division of UK Advertising holding company, Aegis PLC, in 2004), had PR agencies and internal PR teams that worked hard to win her favor in the hopes that she would write about our news. When she was done interviewing me on those occasions when I was fortunate enough to be included as a source, I would always ask her for her take on the news of the day.

Rebecca brings a lifetime of deep marketing experience to her opinions on digital marketing and search marketing. Also, she always had a fresh perspective or an interesting context through which she viewed a particular industry development.

When she told me she would be writing a book about SEO, I was excited for our industry. Books can elevate important ideas to new audiences of important decision makers and expand people’s understanding of the priority and importance of an area of study. This book will accomplish exactly that, and I’m certain it will help to elevate the marketplace’s understanding of the importance of SEO as the bedrock of search marketing. Though there have been many books written about SEO already, most have been very tactical and dealt exclusively with the particulars of tweaking your HTML or building inbound links. Although Rebecca’s book surely contains SEO tactics that can immediately be put into practice to gain higher rankings, her unique perspective as someone immersed in marketing both online and offline ensures that the book speaks to the boardroom or the marketer, and not exclusively to the webmaster.

This is because Rebecca brings deep marketing experience and a unique historical perspective to every subject she covers. Think about it: Every development at every major search engine over the last several years has been covered by her, or by one of her reporters whose work she reviewed and approved. She was often privy to inside information and advance notice on most important industry developments. Rebecca has chronicled the rise of the Web and of Google, the decline of MSN and Yahoo’s market share, and the important developments in our industry.

She has been to almost every industry conference, and enjoyed ringside seats to the rise of digital and the evolution of traditional advertising to a more digital footing. That someone of Rebecca’s stature and brainpower has thought it worthwhile to write about SEO is a powerful development, in and of itself, for all of us who make our living working in search.

For years, SEO has been unfairly treated like the ugly stepchild of digital marketing—too complicated and technical for the boardroom or the chief marketing officer. All too often, it has been relegated to the IT professionals to argue about meta tags. PPC search advertising is much sexier than SEO and has lately become the domain of advertising agency types who have greater access to the most senior marketers at major brands.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, however, is the foundation, the bedrock of online marketing. It isn’t just the foundation of search marketing; I submit to you that it is the foundation of all marketing. This is exactly because we live in a world where increasingly, Google dominates the search landscape, and Google has taught people to love to search.

When people see an ad on TV and they want to learn more, what do they do? They go online and search. When a natural disaster strikes, what do people do? They search. When people have questions about life, about science, about business, about education, about travel, or about their health, what do they do? They search. The behavior of search is becoming an entrenched, and widely adopted, human behavior. We don’t even think about it anymore. We just search for anything at all.

In the 12 years or so since search engine marketing has been in existence, we have learned this one truth: All media, all marketing, and all communication have one thing in common—they all drive people to search. And in a recent study conducted by Jupiter Research, of all the people who were stimulated by an offline cause to go online and search, some 40 percent of them actually made a purchase.

And when someone types a keyword into the search box and presses that search button, there are only two possible outcomes:

1. They will find you.

2. They will find your competitor.

Google’s market share in the United States is nearing 70 percent of all searches, according to HitWise. Across Western Europe, Google has a 91 percent share of search audience—91 percent!

But Google’s dirty little secret is that fully 72 percent of all people who search Google click in the natural or organic search results, not the paid ads. For this reason alone, SEO must be the foundation of your search marketing campaign. If you learn how to cause your website to appear at or near the top of the search results when someone searches for a relevant keyword, you can harvest traffic from Google, free traffic, all day long, month after month—at no incremental cost.

Pay-per-click, or PPC, search advertising has its place, too. It is immediate, and you can control your position and the keywords that trigger your ads to a greater degree than with SEO. But PPC search advertising has significant limitations, too. Every click has a cost. And for most verticals, no marketer can afford to buy every click for all of their keywords. Google will literally throttle your search ad on and off all day long to ensure that you do not exceed your set daily budget. That means that hundreds, sometimes thousands of searchers will never see your ad or know that you exist while searching for various keywords—that is, unless you are also found in the natural search results by using SEO.

SEO ensures that once you attain a top ranking on a particular keyword or group of keywords, every searcher will see your listing—all day long, all night long, every day, week, month, or sometimes even for years at a time.

In this way, every additional ranking you achieve through SEO has incremental value at little, if any, out-of-pocket cost. However, with PPC search advertising, the moment your budget expires so, too, does your visibility. If you run out of money, you are instantly invisible.

To engage in a search marketing strategy that does not first include a foundation of good SEO, which targets the area of the search results page where the vast majority of search engine users click, is like filling your car with gasoline but forgetting to add the oil. It will start right up, but it may not go very far.

And recently, SEO changed dramatically, again. When Google announced “Universal Search,” SEO got even more interesting and valuable. No longer were the search results simply “10 blue links,” but suddenly search results were colorful with images of videos from YouTube and thumbnails of photographs and news all integrated into the search results. Today, being found at the top of the search results cannot be ensured by merely optimizing your website’s HTML. Today, SEO necessarily includes optimizing a variety of different types of media that your company produces, such as video content, PDFs, and photographs. It involves distributing and optimizing each of these forms of media for a variety of different kinds of social media sites and vertical search engines. SEO also means securing listings in the major search engine’s “tabs” if you hope to consistently be found on the first page of the search results.

And today, the mass market typical search engines such as Google and Yahoo! are no longer the only ones that matter. YouTube is a search engine of video content, Amazon.com is a search engine of books and products, and Flickr is a search engine of photographs.

Although PPC search advertising can reach into these properties and ensure your ad is displayed alongside this content, SEO strategies can ensure that you are the content being displayed. And remember, search engines are listening to your customers as they discuss and link to your brands in a variety of social media settings, and they’re using this information as “signal data” in their relevancy algorithms. Because of this, “social media optimization” now influences your ability to achieve top rankings in the major search engines.

In a world where people search using keywords, and every major website is, to some extent or another, a search engine of specialty content or a source of relevancy information to a major search engine, understanding the concepts of SEO grows in importance every year.