The importance of high placement in search engines can best be explained by looking at some statistics.

The following is taken from Target Marketing (http://www.targetonline.com) magazine:

The 46% using search engines to find sites relates to some 345,000,000 unique visitors each month to the major search engines, a number that increases month on month (Media Metrix August 2001). This breaks down across the search engines as follows:

So search engine inclusion is crucial, but is high placement. Well it is when you consider that the most people don't look past the first three pages of results. Indeed, a significant number don't even look past the first page. It is vital, therefore, to get a good listing under the search terms that are important to you, otherwise your competition are benefitting from all the traffic.