Here are steps to increase your search engine rankings:

1. Check your listings If you are going to see an increase in traffic to your web site, you need to be listed in top 20-30 sites. Go to http://www.marketleap.com to see if you are listed in top 30 sites on major search engines. If you are not listed in them, you should at least submit your site to major search engines (read “How to get listed in major search engines”. http://www.isitebuild.com/majorsearchengines). If you are already in top 10, then keep monitoring your site's rankings to maintain your position. If you are not in top 30, continue with next step.

2. Select right keywords and phrases Go to www.wordtracker.com or overture suggestion tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion) to find most popular words and phrases that suit theme of your web site.

Weave these words and phrases into your meta tags (title, description and keyword tags), web copy (particularly first 200 words of your web page) and links (i.e. if your site is called camping.com and you have a page for camping tools, name link www.camping.com/campingtools.htm, instead of www.camping.com/generic.htm).

Optimize each web page with different keywords. Visitors can then enter your site from different pages, depending on what keyword they entered in search engines.

3. Exchange reciprocal links Search for other sites that compliment your own site and ask for a link back to your site. Ideally site should have same keyword phrase as yours and already have a high search engine ranking. These are quality links.

The Problem: Increase Profits

As a small business owner or manager, you have one principal goal: increase your profits. Whether you are a sole proprietor looking to increase your own income, or a corporate manager looking to increase shareholder equity, your bottom line is bottom line. Whether you need to move more widgets or provide more services, ultimately you need to increase your income by expanding your revenue while decreasing your expenses. You need to reach new customers, and keep your current customers coming back for more.

How do you solve problem: Communication

If you want people to purchase your goods and services, they need to know that you exist, and what you can do for them. You need to communicate information about your products and services to as many potential customers as possible. This requires more than just broadcasting your message. To be truly efficient, you need to tell your story to those who will actually want to do business with you. You need to focus your efforts.

How do you communicate: Advertising

There are several media available to you for getting your message across. The most basic is simple word-of-mouth. This costs you nothing, but you also have very little control over how your message is communicated. For a small, local business, this may work fine, but in Internet age, where your customers probably don't come from a small neighborhood, this is not enough.

Traditional electronic media are available to you. Local radio and television spots can reach a great number of people in your community. The question here, however, is just who your message is reaching. These ads are focused on a rather broad demographic: sugary cereals on Saturday mornings, razors and fast cars on sports shows, and so on. If this is sufficiently focused for you, you may be in good shape, except that these spots can be fairly costly. A 30-second radio spot can cost $100 or more, depending on market; a television ad can cost over $1000 for same spot, with network spots going for much more. In addition, there are production costs, with professional actors, editing, and so forth. They are also pretty ethereal--when ad is finished, it goes away.

Print advertising has advantage that it doesn't disappear when reader has finished looking at your ad. They can go back and look at it again. For local coverage, print advertising can be pretty inexpensive. A four-line classified ad in local newspaper costs practically nothing. Even display ads can be fairly inexpensive, given that you will reach a large number of people. For national coverage, print can become quite expensive. The rate sheet for a respected national new magazine charges over $200,000 for a one-page color ad in their national edition!

In all these cases, you have to look at who is being targeted. In print ad, you are looking at everybody who reads magazine or newspaper. Does everybody who reads that publication want to buy your product? If not, then this is probably not most efficient use of your marketing dollar. Even with focused traditional electronic media, you may be reaching a broader segment of population than you want to--you may not be interested in all women in 18-49 group, for example.

What about World Wide Web? We've all seen banner ads on websites. These may get your message to a more focused group, but there are problems that come with banner ads. Banner ads have become so ubiquitous that many people simply ignore them. Or worse, they have software that will actually remove them from web pages as they view pages. Your message doesn't get to anybody that way.

Pop-up ads and their newer incarnation, pop-under ad, are often not appreciated by users on Web. Having several browsers opened on a user's desktop can be quite disconcerting for them.

What is most cost-effective, focused way to communicate with your market: Your Web Site