WHEN Conor Dooley set up Comprend, his Limerick-based business consultancy two years ago, one of the first things he did was get a website.

“I went to a design company that specialised in websites and got one that was strong on graphics and visual content,” he said. But having spent €3,000 on the site, he was disappointed by the lack of traffic it attracted. “Three months after going live, it was still only visited by people who already knew it was there.”

Many small firms have had similar experiences, because having a website is only the first step to online marketing. Attracting users is the key — and to do that, you’ve got to attract a search engine.

There are two types of search engine: directories and web crawlers. Directories, such as Yahoo, pay staff to consider every new website submitted, before slotting them into appropriate categories. Web crawlers, such as Google or Ask Jeeves, work by sending out programs called bots that trawl the web for information relevant to a user’s keyword search.

Getting keyword searchers to click onto your website is the cyber space equivalent of catching passing trade. As such, making it to the top of listings for sites such as Google is the holy grail for commercial firms.

More than 90% of all referrals to e-commerce sites come from the internet’s four largest search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Competition for a high ranking on these sites is intense because only 10% of web users look beyond the second page of results. If your business isn’t in the top 20, therefore, chances are it will not be seen at all. To generate significant traffic, you really need to be in the top five.

As one of only a handful of specialist business strategists in the country, Dooley expected any user entering the keywords “business”, “strategist” and “Ireland” to be rewarded with his web address. In fact, it wasn’t featuring at all. What he hadn’t realised was that he had to make his site attractive to search engines, a process called “search engine optimisation”.

“No amount of money will get you up the Google listings,” said William Cotter, managing director of Net Affinity, an online marketing company. However, a fair bit of search engine optimisation can be done by website owners.

Typically, the first step is to make sure the site is registered with all the big search engines. Their sites will have a facility enabling you to do this, usually for free.

When search engines sift through millions of web pages instantaneously, looking for content that matches the searcher’s keywords, part of what they are looking for are links that point to your site. So organising reciprocal links with complementary businesses or forums can push your site higher up the results page.

You can also tweak the text to make it more appealing to search engines. This involves making correct use of as many keywords, including misspelled versions, as you think a potential customer is likely put in the search box to find you. Using these key words as often as possible will help, although most search engines have a facility to filter out repetition.

To succeed, you need to think of as many keyword variations as you can. A florist, for example, could use flower-seller, flowers and roses. Where you place your keywords is also important. They must appear on title tags — the names you put on individual web pages, which appear at the top of the user’s web browser.

You can opt to pay for advertisements on search engines, typically paying a fee each time someone clicks through to your site from the engine’s page. The cost per click can depend on how hotly contested your keywords are. The more you pay, the higher your ad will be positioned.