Used to be having a Web page was enough to catapult mom & pop businesses from the back roads to the Information Superhighway.

But today even a Web site is not enough. You have to market it.

There are literally billions of pages out there, some of which are dead, some of which are garbled and many of which are useful, but difficult to find.

"Clearly, it's not enough to be on the Internet now," said Hugh Curley of the Small Business Administration's Connecticut office. "You have to be seen on the Internet. That's the most important thing."

Despite the dot-com implosion of recent years, the amount of material on the Internet doubles every eight months, according to a report prepared by Harry Collier, the managing director of a British company called Infonortics Ltd., and Stephen E. Arnold, of Kentucky-based Arnold Information Technology.

The danger is that a company's site can become a needle in the growing digital haystack. Sixty-one percent of all small-businesses had Web sites in 2001, according to a survey by the federal Small Business Administration.

Companies have begun paying a premium to firms like Web Solutions in Meriden, not only to design and program effective sites, but to market those sites once they are online. Steve Rinaldi, a partner at Innovative Internet Marketing Solutions in Wallingford, said five years ago, only 10 percent of their business involved Web-site marketing; today, marketing contracts account for half of their overall business.

Meanwhile, Google, Yahoo! and Overture are offering new ways for companies to advertise online - from selling listings on their search engines, to Web site sponsorships - and are raking in hundreds of millions of dollars doing it. Overture, for example - an affiliate of companies including Yahoo!, Lycos and Microsoft - reported $172.1 million in revenue during the third quarter of 2002.

"In any kind of market, people will find an opportunity to provide an extra service," said Edward A. Fox, director of the Internet Technology Innovation Center at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, who has studied Internet marketing. "The Web is a very effective way to do business, and people are learning to use it more effectively."

The tricks of the trade

John Dominello, owner of Modern Formals, a family-owned tuxedo shop with stores in Southington, Meriden, and North Haven, works with Web Solutions on strategies to make sure his page lands on top of the cyber heap. "You put unique names so they'll find you," said Dominello, a Web Solutions client.

Metatags, or invisible codes, are one way search engines find sites. For example, if someone were looking for an Oscar de la Renta cummerbund, a metacrawler search engine, like Google, would search for matches on both "cummerbund" and "Oscar de La Renta." The more specific the words, the more accurate the hits.

Metacrawlers also base their rankings on what they call reciprocal links, or the number of pages of other companies or organizations to which a page connects - the more related links, the more relevant the page becomes, according to engines' algorithms. That's why Dominello has links to designers and articles about the styles he stocks and companies that sell invitations and favors.

"Every search engine is constantly reinventing how you have to submit yourself," said Lori Barton of Web Solutions. "It's constantly evolving and there is no right answer," she said.

At one time the human indexers who work for Yahoo! would try to identify and categorize sites based on the number of hits they received, or viewer recommendations. Now, the company - which faces stock values one-tenth of what they were in April 2000 - charges a $299 annual listing fee.

"You want to make sure you get in front of the target market," said Tom Barton of Web Solutions. It might not make sense for a pizza shop, for example, to advertise on Google, but if they have an online ordering or delivery service, it might make sense to do some "offline" advertising, Barton said, such as printing the URL on napkins or painting it on the sides of trucks.

Savvy Web users know that they also need a memorable URL. Even if the Web address doesn't exactly match the company's name, what matters most is that its address is something that will stick in people's minds.

Innovative Components in Southington, for example, manufactures gauges that measure fluid and temperature levels in devices such as hot water heaters or manufacturing equipment. And although it does not match the brick-and-mortar name, Innovative Components' URL is www.liquidlevel.com .

But a slip of the finger on the keyboard could send you someplace else. As the Internet world gets more cutthroat, companies use different strategies to get an edge. Customers of Innovative Components, for example, might remember www.liquidlevel.com , but www.liquidlevels.com - virtually a match - automatically redirects viewers to www.senix.com , a company based in Vermont and a direct competitor.

With content on the Internet more than doubling each year, the competition among companies to find niches for themselves and be noticed will only become fiercer, according to the report by Collier and Arnold, published last week and titled "Search Engines: Evolution and Diffusion."

"Content is expanding more rapidly than indexers - humans, robots or hybrid systems - can index," the report states. And with the six biggest search engine firms returning revenues of more than $1.5 billion to owners and shareholders, there's no reason for Internet and consulting companies to stop devising new ways to help.

"It's a natural cycle," said Rinaldi. "You can develop it, it can be out there, but you still have to get people to go to it.

"Once you get people caught on the concept, it's a no-brainer."

Paying for placement

An extra service Internet companies now offer is pay-for-placement. Search engines such as Google and Overture - formerly GoTo.com - have a system of bidding for ads that run alongside the list of regular links.

For example, a plumber might bid on the keyword "toilet bowl." When the Google user types "toilet bowl" in the search engine box, the returns include the regular links, sorted by relevancy and popularity among other factors along the left.

On the right hand side of the page, however, is a string of colorful boxes that are ads related to the search topic, with the winning bid listed at the top, and the lowest bid at the end of the string.

The idea is to ensure that one's link doesn't get buried deep down on the list.

The top-sponsored "toilet bowl" link, for example, is a link to www.designerplumbing.com , a company in Florida that sells everything from claw-foot tubs to cedar saunas. Without the AdWord, www.designerplumbing.com doesn't even appear on the first 150, let along the first 50, Google matches.

For Google, giving that site good play pays. Companies are charged a commission each time someone clicks on their ads. Rates range from a few cents to much more, based on the popularity of keywords.

In Yahoo!, sponsored links aren't off to the side at all; they're right on top. And while the top three links are set apart by the heading "sponsored link," they are designed to look just like a non-sponsored listing.

"You get people who differentiate," said Rinaldi, "but most people see them as one result."

And in directories powered by Google - Netscape, Earthlink, CompuServe and AT&T WorldNet, for example - the sponsored links work much like Yahoo!'s, appearing as the top three search matches.

"Most people don't identify them as advertisements, and that's one of the things that keeps the response rates good."

Response rates are the number of times a web surfer clicks on a specific ad.

Companies found traditional techniques like banner ads and pop-up windows were good for branding, but showed poor return on investment, no matter how flashy or dynamic. And while branding might be enough for a national retailer, it's ineffective and expensive for the regular mom & pop business.

Click-through, or response rates, on banner ads are regularly below one percent, according to Sudip Bhattacharjee, a professor of operations and information management at the University of Connecticut School of Business. In fact, banner ads have such poor reception that AskJeeves.com stopped running them altogether this year.

Some pay-for-placement ads, on the other hand, have click-though rates as high as 25 percent, Bhattacharjee said.

Business owners should beware of spam artists, though. There are several fly-by-night companies that offer to list a site on 9,000 search engines for $49.99.

"Ten percent of (search engines) get 99 percent of the market share," said Rinaldi. His employees help clients place their paid spots strategically, he said, by looking carefully at keywords and return rates, not by sheerly increasing the number of listings.

Google and Yahoo alone account for 65 percent of Internet traffic and, according to Rinaldi, $4,000 per year is enough to buy a respectable campaign on both.

Between Overture, which feeds MSN, Yahoo! Infospace, CNET and AltaVista, among others; and Google, which runs its own placements while feeding EarthLink, AOL, CompuServe and more; most of those top ten are covered, leaving little reason to pay to place elsewhere.

The trick, then, is in picking the keyword. One that is too broad will cost more in hit commissions that don't bring in new customers. A well-chosen keyword, on the other hand, may attract a few Web crawlers but may result in sales more often than not.

And it gets even more complex. Overture, for example, operates on a keyword bidding system, and in some cases the values of keywords change daily, making paid placement less like buying an ad in the Yellow Pages and more like day-trading stocks.

And while SBC SNET boasts 84 million visitors to SMARTpages (its online phone directory) each year, Google boasts 150 million visits per day.

By Hannah C. Glover, Record-Journal staff