With nearly one in every four people on planet Earth now using the Internet, its growth has been nothing short of explosive since the web’s inception in 1999. Indeed, worldwide growth of Internet usage is estimated at over 340% since 2000, with the biggest gains coming from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.

So what’s the bottom line? It means that nearly 1.6 billion people worldwide are surfing the web today, and a fair number of them are likely to be using the Internet to research products and ultimately, to buy them. The U.S. The Census bureau guesses that last year over $133 billion was spent buying products online in America alone. That’s more revenue than international stalwarts like AT&T, IBM, or Bank of America were able to generate last year.

Want your share of that $133 billion dollar pie? Then your website needs to find different alternatives to promote visibility and drive incoming, non-stop traffic day in and day out. Do you think this might happen with a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign where you have to pay for ads every time a user clicks one of them? Think again. Many PPC advertisers find that sales don’t keep up with PPC costsm so the end up turning off the campaigns and sometimes their websites go down with them.

Small business entrepreneurs with the desire to maximize their web presence realize that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a much better long-term solution over PPC. They might not know that SEO must go beyond keyword research and HTML tag improvement. Instead, SEO should focus on getting the highest degree of leverage possible from a wide variety of Internet-based resources. Ideally, these resources will be selected carefully by a Small Business SEO Agency,and they will be aimed at increasing exposure for your website using a combination of the following:

* Optimization of individual website pages. By avoiding the inclination to focus SEO efforts on the site at large, traffic can be exponentially improved through finding doorways that allow individual pages to rank high within search engines.

* Backlinks. Visitors coming to your website from a link that is embedded in outside websites improve search engine ranking results. A good SEO firm will work hard to secure backlink opportunities and will do so in an ethical and professional way.

* Competition Analysis: A thorough understanding of keywords used by your competition is essential to uncovering hidden opportunities to drive traffic your way.

* Social Media Properties. Strategically harnessing the explosion in online social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc) will work to further expand the exposure your site enjoys.

*Thorough Reports. No search engine package can be assessed without detailed and time-sensitive reports of all results. With dedicated analysis of such reports, adjustments to strategy can be made in real time to increase the overall effectiveness of the plan.

These are just some examples of the effective tools that SEO firms have to help you promote your business online. Selecting an advanced seo services firm is an important decision for your small business, because competition for sales is hard enough in good times, let alone when markets are shrinking.

Indeed, the first quarter of 2009 indicated a slower rate of ecommerce sales for this year, but the pace is off only about five percent compared to the double-digit declines seen in total retail sales over the last year. In today’s turbulent economic conditions, such a modest decline puts the ecommerce world ahead of most businesses. If you are looking to promote a new small business or simply increase visibility of your current business, a properly managed SEO strategy might just save you from participating in the current recession altogether.