How are your customers finding you? Do you advertise locally? Are you on the internet? Are you listed in the phone book? Or do you just keep your fingers crossed hoping someone will walk by your storefront, realize they need your product and stop in for a sale? If you are like many companies today, you rely on the internet as a secondary contact point for your customers to find you - but how do you know they are looking for you? Do they know where to look?

As a seasoned marketer and a certified Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing Expert, I have learned and experienced the benefits of knowing how to properly and effectively benefit from positioning my products and services on the internet. Experiencing what a "human" salesperson can do for me and seeing what having my website perform as a 24-7-365 sales person, I have significantly experience the growth in my bottom line sales and have quickly realized that positioning my website to be effective is Much more cost effective than building a team of "human" droids to peddle my products and services. If you want to quickly increase your sales and your overall net bottom line you will really benefit from reading this introduction article on why and how you and your business can optimize your business potential by properly positioning your products and services on the internet.

Generally, when a customer searches on the internet for a product - they search the product category - not the business name (unless they have previously come into contact with the name of your business). Or they may know your business name, but maybe your website URL is different. Are you a .com, a .ca or a.net? The process of search engine optimization can help you to increase traffic to your website on general topic searches through the use of effective keywords. Although, the topic of search engine optimization can be complex there is a certain process you can follow to help you preparing your website to getting on the right track for optimal optimization!!! Are you ready to optimize your business potential? Follow these three easy steps: Site review, keyword search, and competitor search.

For website review, you simply review the site map of your website. What are the contents that you have on your website and the relevancy to your business? Remember that you stand a better chance increasing your page ranking by providing search engines with good quality content - so make all your page content count.

Once you are comfortable with the set up of your website - next begin to develop some keywords that you think your customer would type into a search engine to land on your page. This is where you are going to need to get your creative juices flowing. Try to avoid general overused keywords and go for more specific logical choices. For example: don't use the word insurance company when the search results for that keyword phrase are in the millions - try for something more specific and localized, or unique to your product, like Insurance brokers in California.

Lastly, whichever keywords or phrases you decide to implement in your web pages, you should always do a competitive search on the words you are using. If over a million websites contain the same phrase you risk getting lost and if your listed on search result page 22... Chances are your potential customer has found another website. Also, research which pages are coming up in the results - take a few minutes and look at the top 8-10 results in a search and see if you can identify what these companies strategies were. Maybe they've used search engine optimization, but then again... maybe they didn't and it's just luck or another factor for their placement in the search results.

Optimize your business potential is not as easy as it may seem. Of course, these three steps are just the beginning to the process of Search Engine Optimization. And even these steps have steps within them. The process of search engine optimization can begin to get overwhelming if you are not familiar with the strategies of effective optimization. But when you get stuck, you can always look into a certified search engine optimization service (you'll know you've found the right one when you search for them and they are the number one search result).