Today more than 90% of all businesses are small businesses. We are the backbone of the United States economy and together we provide more services and goods per square mile than any other country. But when you are a small business owner, the competition can seem overwhelming. How do you separate yourself from the competition and gain an edge? How do you become the leader in your industry?

Believe it or not, today’s small businesses have a much greater advantage than those 10 years ago. We simply have the most powerful device at our fingertips, the Internet. Utilizing this tool can maximize your exposure and increase sales almost instantly. For example, free listings at Yahoo! Local, Google, MSN, and Yahoo! inclusion submissions and free directory listings can get your site or business services exposed to potential buyers all over the globe. Add in a few hundred bucks a month and you could be getting hundreds of thousands of potential buyers viewing your goods and services from Maryland to Japan. The Internet is such a vital and powerful tool that experts are advising businesses without a website will be out of business by 2010.

Let me give you an example of a small business capitalizing on the Internet. Pacific West Moving LLC is a labor only moving company in the Maryland and DC Metro area. There website is clean and robot friendly, a term describing a site that search engine robots can easily scan for information. In addition, they have there website linked to hundreds of directory listings and rating sites allowing for additional exposure and gaining an edge on the competition. Further more, they have PPC (Pay per click) ads running on Google Adwords as well as a few closely related sites linking back to their website. So what does this do? This allows Pacific West Moving to gain additional points on the big search engines such as Yahoo! , Google, and MSN.

So you want to get started yourself? Well the first and most vital thing everyone needs is a website. This website must be clean, user friendly, and easy to navigate. Once you have your site, submit it to all the major search engines. Do not allow a search engine submitter tool do this for you, it will hurt your sites rankings and possibly get you removed. Once you have submitted your site, start listing on directories. I suggest Google's open directory(http://dmoz.org), Yahoo! Local, Respond Network (http://www.respond.com), Craigslist (http://www.craigslist.com). There are hundreds of other quality sites and a little time searching for them can produce great results. The Internet is a powerful tool and the brightest entrepreneurs out there will capitalize on this and be very successful.