It is more important than ever for small businesses to have a Web site, but building a site is only half the battle. You must also attract customers.

Making sure your site has a good page ranking with Web search engines is one way to draw customers. You want your site to appear in the first few results when potential customers do Web searches related to your business.

Search engine optimization is the process of getting a good page rank. Search sites don’t disclose their algorithms, but certain techniques have proven effective.

CHOOSING KEYWORDS

The first step is to pick out keywords. These are the search terms customers will use to find you. Picking keywords can be tricky. Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion) will help.

It is difficult to rank highly with really popular keywords because too many people use them. Optimize pages for several less popular terms. Choose narrow search terms instead of broad ones. You have a better chance of getting a good rating.

Unless you have a strong brand, don’t use your company name as a keyword. People search by product type, not by name. However, you may want to optimize a page for your location. This is particularly true if you provide a service.

USING KEYWORDS

Once you’ve chosen keywords for a particular page, you’re ready to go to work. Use the keywords in the page’s text, but don’t overdo it. Focus on providing quality content. Use the keywords in the page’s metatags and in headings. HTML pages use metatags to tell Web browsers about the page. In the HTML code, you’ll find title, keyword and description metatags.

Avoid software that writes pages for you. Search sites may detect pages written by software and penalize them.

And don’t try to trick the search sites by hiding text. At one time, sites packed keywords into blocks of text that were the same color as the background. They were not visible to the reader. But search sites are wise to that. Try it and you’ll likely be penalized.

You can test your keywords with pay-per-click advertising. Bid on keywords through a service like Google’s AdWords. See if the words attract paying customers.

You can also put the ads on your site. If your pages are optimized well, the contextual ads will relate to your keywords.

BUILDING INCOMING LINKS

In-bound links to your site also improve your rank. Each link counts as a vote for your site. So encourage other reputable sites to link to yours.

Avoid link farms - Web pages that do nothing more than link to other sites. A link farm would be used to boost your site’s apparent popularity. But search engines are on to link farms. You may be penalized for using one.

You may want to start blogging about your industry. You can use a free service like Blogger, WordPress or LiveJournal. Link back to your site frequently.

OUTSOURCING YOUR SEO

You should monitor your SEO campaign, but be patient; it can take a few months to see results. You’ll need to tweak pages as time passes because search sites change their algorithms. Also, other pages could gain higher rankings, pushing yours down.

To speed things along, submit your site to the search engines. Submitting repeatedly is considered spamming. So be judicious. Submit your site at the following links:

Google: www.google.com/addurl/?continue(EQUALS)/addurl.

Yahoo: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request (registration required).

MSN: http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx.

If your efforts are unsuccessful, consider outsourcing your SEO campaign. Many companies specialize in SEO.