When you want Internet users to find your business online, the key phrase is Search Engine Optimization. Most anyone with an online presence has probably received an offer from a professional SEO service offering to bump up your page rankings for a fee. For the do-it-yourselfers, however, there are a number of tools, some free and others for a nominal fee, available to optimize your search-engine rankings.

While the term Search Engine Optimization has been around for more than a decade, the sheer volume of websites and the economic need to drive traffic to them has created an entire SEO culture of strategies and expertise. Broadly categorized as “Black Hat SEO,” “White Hat SEO,” or the newly coined “Gray Hat SEO” designation, these methodologies can produce highly desirable ranking results. Misuse, on the other hand, can get your site barred by search engines. More…

You’ve decided what items you will offer online, developed great products to sell, built a fantastic-looking website and peppered it with key words to make it soar in the search engines. Yet all that effort is not enough to guarantee that your Internet business will be a success.

You can have the best pizza, the best boutique – or the best website – but if no one knows about it, few will come. With all the mechanisms in place for successful Internet sales to take place once a visitor stops by your site, you must now become an expert in getting the consumer to your site. More…

So you want to get in the Internet game and test your entrepreneurial prowess on the World Wide Web? It’s true that Internet businesses can be great wealth-building revenue streams, but there are also a lot of misconceptions that can lead you down a trail of frustration or even failure.

Here are some Facts and Myths about Internet-based businesses. Test your knowledge here before you get to the grand opening of your virtual business doors. More…

Have you been “tweeting” your own horn? If you don’t know what we’re talking about, it’s past time to catch up on the latest social media phenomenon – Twitter.

Twitter offers you the chance to send short messages of 140 characters or less — commonly known as “tweets” — to any other Twitter member who has chosen to “follow” you. You can send the messages from your laptop or desktop – but most users send and receive tweets on their cell phones. More…

Creating wealth often means simply coming up with a great little idea. It’s usually one of those ideas that has others saying, “I could have thought of that.”

Case in point? CafePress.com.

CafePress.com got its start in California in 1999 as an idea that people might want to create their own artwork and see it printed on T-shirts and other products. Artists could open up their own “shops,” CafePress would set a baseline price for each product, and the “shopkeepers” could set their own retail price above the base price, pocketing the difference. More…

When looking for a business to start or a service to offer, take a lesson from history: Mine for a little gold, if you want, but make your main business the tools behind the trend.

During the many gold rushes throughout the United States in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, only a handful of the thousands of gold prospectors hit the mother lode. But nearly all of the providers of mining tools made their fortunes. That’s a difficult concept to grasp at first. For one thing, it is much less glamorous. It can also be a slower and much more predictable road to wealth, but it is often more lucrative. More…

Greg Cangialosi, president and CEO of email service provider Blue Sky Factory, started his company with a few thousand dollars in 2001, just in time to get caught in the fallout of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Yet Cangialosi has seen Blue Sky grow each year since its founding, through two of the toughest economic time periods the United States has seen in 30 years. How did he do it? Here are some of Cangiolosi’s top tips for launching a new business straight to the top: More…

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a big phrase that simply means you want to design your website so that it comes up first on Google or other search engines when Internet users search for any of the key terms related to your business. SEO is big business, but there are many free things you can do on your own to maximize your website’s reach and impact.

Here are 14 ways to get your site ready for search engine “spiders” or “crawlers” (the programs that scan the entire web and collect pieces of information from different sites to add to search engines) to find and like you.

1. It can’t be said too many times: Content is king on the Internet. You have to have quality content in your text, ads, links and pages to rank well. More…

Greg Cangialosi started Blue Sky Factory, a leading email-service provider, in 2001 with an initial investment of “only a couple thousand dollars,” he admits.

“We started in 2001, when getting investors wasn’t even possible [due to the 9/11 terrorist attacks],” the president and CEO tells WEALTH magazine. “We had no choice but to bootstrap it. We launched without any venture capital and grew it organically. We did $3.6 million [in 2008] and are on track to do $5 million [in 2009].” More…

Forty-four-year-old multimillionaire Paul Graham has developed computer programs that changed the World Wide Web, studied art in foreign countries, written critically acclaimed books and blog entries and developed programs with hackers who have been honored by top universities and investigated by the Feds. He has amassed a small fortune because of his technological talent and spent some of it helping other programmers get off the ground. Still, this talented entrepreneur describes himself as a “nerd.” He was in the chess club in high school and sat at a table of outcasts in the lunch room.  More…