Winfield has three top tips for Balsam: Her site needs to be linked to from other quality websites. She should have a clear website title. And she needs descriptive copy that includes the search terms (called keywords) that articulate how she wants to be discovered by search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, he says.

"Keywords direct the search engines to how to find you," Winfield says. "And links are the holy grail. If a lot of sites link to you, that means you have authority and should be placed higher than others."

The first step for many businesses is realizing exactly what their keywords should be. A house painter, for example, shouldn't use "house painting" as a keyword, because it's so broad. Instead, the painter might drill down to the more specific "interior house painting" or "exterior house painting."

In designing a website, Winfield says, the most important keyword for a business should be on the site's title page (visible along the top of Internet Explorer or other web browsers). This is the first thing Google looks for when crawling the Web.

Getting one great link from a top, heavily trafficked site (like www.engadget.com for a technology item) is worth more than 25 mentions on the many directory sites that are all over the Web, Winfield says.