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“Link popularity is also important. If there are lots of links to your site, the search engine will see your site as an authority, and that will push you up the rankings. The key is to submit your site to as many online directories as you can.”

One option here is to find out what your competitors’ links are. This is done by keying their web address in to the Google search box, preceded by the command “link:”.

There are other tricks of the trade. “Having online news- letters or ezines with lots of links to your own website, a blog with links back to your site or online PR will also push you up the ratings,” said Murray.

Blogs are very “search-engine friendly” because they are rich in key words, and contain a large amount of text.

For Ivan Lynch, director of the Ennis-based bespoke tourism firm Authentic Ireland, a €10,000 investment in search-engine optimisation saw his company jump from page four in the American Google rankings to a current ranking in the top 10 for “Ireland tours, travel and vacation” — and rising.

This has translated into a 25% boost in bookings. “Our business is dependent on the website for attracting customers,” said Lynch. “Even though we have in-house web designers, there were things we were doing that were wrong and we didn’t even know.”

Search-engine optimisation — or search-engine marketing, as it is also called — may seem like a dark art to the uninitiated, but you can do quite a lot of it yourself.

To maximise traffic you also can opt to pay for advertisements on search engines, typically paying a fee each time somebody clicks through to your site from a search engine page. A far cheaper way of generating web traffic is to include your web address on all your business stationery.

More than 20% of web visits come from web referrals, which means making sure your web address is on e-mail footers, too.

“At the very least you should be able to find your own company by Googling it,” said Michael Heraghty, Dublin-based author of Website Findability: How to Get Traffic from Google and Other Search Engines.

“You’d be surprised how many websites don’t feature, simply because of the way they were designed. Equally, the principals in any company should be easily found by Googling too — because prospective clients very often run searches on individuals — yet here again they very often aren’t.”

Among the most common problems is the overuse of graphics. “Images should be used sparingly and should not contain text,” said Heraghty.