WHEN Galway-based Kevin Kelly established his business as a personal development speaker, one of the first things he did was establish a website. As far as generating business went, he needn’t have bothered.

“My initial website was very pretty, but absolutely useless in terms of generating business. Nobody visited it, full stop,” said Kelly.

The problem, as with many websites, is that it operated below the search-engine radar.

Frustrated, he engaged a specialist in search-engine optimisation to overhaul his online presence with a view to getting further up Google’s listings.

Today his site sits in the top four in any search for “personal development speaker” on Google.com, leading to a steady stream of speaking engagements for Kelly around the world.

“Most of my business still comes from word-of-mouth referrals, but I have increased the leads generated by my website more than 10-fold as a result of being at the top of the listings,” he said.

As Kelly discovered, having a website is only the first battle when it comes to online marketing. To win the war, you have to attract visitors.

In excess of 90% of all referrals to e-commerce websites now come from the four main search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL.

Yet only 10% of web users look beyond the second page of results, so if your business isn’t in the top 20 results, no matter how pretty the web page, it’s practically invisible.

There are two types of search engines — directories and web crawlers. Directories, such as Yahoo, have staff paid to consider every new website submitted before slotting them into categories or subsections.

Web crawlers such as Google or Ask.com work by sending out software programs — called bots — that trawl the web for information relevant to a user’s key word search.

“Very many people think having a website is enough,” said Martin Murray, chief executive of Interactive Return, an internet marketing specialist. “It’s not. You need to have a search-engine-friendly website.”

Certain rules of thumb apply. Search engines read the contents of websites and judge how relevant they are for a certain search. “If you sell widgets, for example, you are going to need plenty of content with the word ‘widgets’ in it,” said Murray.