enlarge Jack Milton/Staff Photographer

Photos by Jack Milton/Staff PhotographerLynn Koenig of The Fine Art Print Gallery, a Web-based business in Bath, examines note cards for a customer last week. She and her husband, Dave, make prints for artists and photographers and sell them on the Internet.Lynn Koenig examines note cards she is printing for a customer Tuesday, June 26, 2007. She and her husband, Dave, run a Web-based business called The Fine Art Print Gallery in Bath. They make prints for artists and photographers and sell them on the Internet.

MAKING YOUR WEB SITE SEARCH-ENGINE FRIENDLY

Make sure each page on your site has a unique title and meta description tag that describes the specific content.

Sign up for a free Google Webmaster account at www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps. It provides lots of information about your site, including any errors and crawling issues.

Almost every Web hosting company provides some type of analytics tool that tracks site traffic. Keeping an eye on this data tells you what keywords your site ranks for, which search engines are driving visitors to your site and which pages are the most popular.

Put a "frequently asked questions" feature on your site. Note the keywords that are driving visitors to that page and build out pages specific to those topics.

Every page that gets indexed in a search engine should be a suitable entry point to your site. If you have a page that states your privacy policy, this is not where you would want a visitor to come into your site. "Squeeze" value into more important areas of your site by excluding these type of pages from being crawled and indexed.

Create a sitemap. Include each page of your site that is suitable as an entry point from a search query. Make the link to the page descriptive.

If you have an internal site search, mine this data for seasonal trends, content topics, and misspellings where visitors aren't finding your products or services.

Source: Alex Bennert of Beyond Ink

Six months later, Stanley Kovensky, who handles the marketing for the South Portland company, tried to find the site on the Internet using specific search words, such as "Maine and wedding cake."

"I couldn't find us on Google searching 20 pages deep," he said. "I was disheartened."

Kovensky found himself grappling with a problem that many small-business owners also face but have yet to even notice: that having a Web site is not enough anymore. They need a Web site that people can find.

Consumers increasingly are using search engines to locate businesses. That means a company's bottom line may depend on landing a premium spot on search result pages.

And there's only so much room at the top. Studies show that few people dig more than three pages.

For industries that rely heavily on Internet marketing, such as tourism, the competition for premium spots has been going on for years. Businesses like hotels and whitewater rafting companies frequently revamp their sites to keep pace with their competitors and the ever-changing site-ranking formulas of search engines, like Google, Yahoo and Ask.com.

But most small-business owners are oblivious to the issue, said Greg Burke, who owns IMS-21, a marketing and Web site development company based in Kennebunk.

Many companies are so complacent that they don't realize that their slick-looking sites are invisible to the Web-crawling robots that search engines use to gain information.

"Far too many people don't understand the difference between a properly designed Web site and a Web site that simply looks good to the human eye," he said. "Some of the prettiest sites simply can't be found."

Within the past two years, there has been a shift in the way many large companies think about their Web sites, said Alex Bennert, a partner with Beyond Ink, a Portland firm that helps national companies rebuild their Web sites.

Whereas companies once saw their Web sites as online brochures, they are now spending tens of thousands of dollars to create sites that are accessible to the Web-crawling robots.

Some of the programs that make Web sites appealing to humans -- like Flash animation -- can't be read by the robots, she said. Also, robots can only read text, so a clean-looking site with lots of photos and not much text isn't going to get much notice, she said.

Beyond Ink is part of new industry that has sprung up to help businesses improve their search results. They call themselves "search-engine optimizers." Some, like Beyond Ink, deal mostly with large and mid-sized companies. Beyond Ink, which recently rebuilt the Web site for JibJab, a popular humor site, charges between $30,000 to $60,000 to totally redesign a complex site.

There are other companies -- both national and local -- that help small companies and charge a lot less.

Kovensky paid Burke $600 to fix his Web site and make it easier to find. Burke created new metatags, the invisible text that gives information about the contends of a page, and submitted the URL to search engines. He also instructed Kovensky to comb through the site and fix all the typographical mistakes. Errors reduce Web site rankings.

Over a period of a few months, Kovensky watched the site climb up in rankings. The bakery, which is run by his wife, Onaiwu Kovensky, now appears on the second page of results after a Google search for the words "Maine wedding cakes."

Another way to score high rankings, the experts say, is to put search words in the domain name rather than the company name. The top Google search result for "Maine wedding cakes," for example, is a Biddeford company called Edible Delights Bakery, which uses the domain name of maineweddingcakes.com.

Web sites that are frequently updated and offer high-quality, useful content also score high. Dave Koenig, co-owner of The Fine Art...