With nearly one in every four people on planet Earth now using the Internet, its growth has been nothing short of explosive since the webs 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.

This equates to nearly 1.6 billion people all across the world who use the Internet today. Chances are that these people surfing the web are hungry for information – information that they will eventually use for purchasing a product or service. Studies estimate that over $130 billion was spent in America online last year. That’s more revenue than fortune 500 companies make!

In order for your small business to get a piece of this $130 billion pie, you need to find different ways of promoting your website online and bringing hundreds of qualified visitors to it on a daily basis. If you’re looking into paid advertising like pay-per-click (PPC), watch out – these campaigns could get extremely expensive and often times lead to campaigns shutting down right with the businesses that spend the money to run them!

Often times small business owners will turn to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to maximize their online exposure and brand recognition. They realize that in the long-run, it’s much more cost-effective than pay-per-click. What these business owners may not know is that SEO is far more complicated than the old ways of just tweaking a website and hoping the search engines improve the rankings. SEO in today’s day and age needs to remain focused on not only that, but also getting the best possible exposure and recognition through other Internet-based resources located “outside” the website itself.

Ideally, these resources will be selected carefully by a reputable SEO firm, and they will be aimed at increasing exposure for your website using a combination of the following:

Optimizing each and every individual page on your website. Lots of folks don’t know this but website don’t rank in the search engines for just the domain name – every single page of your site is available to rank – this means leveraging more pages and more keywords. It significantly increases visitor volume and ranking potential within the search engines.

Building back-links on other sites. When people come to your website through a link that is strategically placed on another site, this is called a bank-link. Back-links serve two purposes – they obviously bring in more traffic to your site directly from other websites, but they also allow your domain to rank higher in the search engine results. A good, ethical SEO firm will work diligently to provide bank-links, often through content, on other relevant websites.

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

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

Detailed Reporting. No SEO program can be properly assessed without comprehensive and timely reporting of results.

These are just some examples of the tools that comprehensive SEO companies will use to further promote your online exposure and brand awareness. Whether you are selling a product or service, sales can be tough even in good times – make sure you choose an effective and ethical SEO firm to promote your business online.

Thus far, in 2009, the pace for ecommerce (compared to 2008) is only off by about 5% – this is nothing compared to the double-digit decline of retail sales in the last 365 days!

In todays turbulent economic conditions, such a modest decline puts the ecommerce world ahead of most businesses. And with a properly managed SEO strategy, your small business could very well avoid participating in the current recession altogether.