Anita Dufalla, Post-Gazette Click illustration for larger image. Coming Sunday: When words are golden: Online marketers track key words to determine how best to reach consumers.

As more companies have turned to the Internet to market their businesses, it's becoming increasingly competitive, if not cutthroat.

Executives at companies of all sizes complain that search engines display other Web sites instead of theirs and that people who should be buying from them are sometimes leaving for other sites before placing an order. To these executives, it looks as if their businesses are losing sales that should be theirs.

Savvy business people, though, recognize that gaining a competitive edge goes way beyond posting a Web site. So they are adding more advanced tools and techniques to leverage their Web site and marketing, such as blogs and podcasts that help consumers learn more about their products and business.

Since the beginning of Internet time, this strategy of so-called search engine optimization has been touted as the way to make your Web site pay off. But if not done right, it can have the opposite effect, making it more difficult for prospects to find your Web site instead of putting it in their easy reach.

Changing face of Internet marketing

Marketers have more options than ever when it comes to finding and communicating with customers and prospects: w Web site: The online marketing tactic that everybody recognizes w Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Modifying pages and work with other Web sites so your Web site shows up sooner in the results listings when a prospect searches for something related to what you do w Analytics: Tracks how people find you, where they go on your Web site and who purchases w E-mail marketing: There's a thin line between good e-mail marketing and sending spam w Affinity programs: Offering current customers and prospects something of value that also keeps them connected to you w Blogs: Informal, Web site-like publications that allow readers to comment to the same audience that sees the original article w Audio/video: Files that a user can find on your Web site that act like radio or TV broadcasts. These can be downloadable to listen/view anytime, or streamed for immediate listening/viewing w Podcasts: Audio or video files that are automatically sent to a user because that user subscribed to get it w Really Simple Syndication (RSS): A technique used to deliver Web articles, blogs and podcasts to users by subscription as soon as they are posted.

-- David Radin

Here's one example of how a promising strategy can go wrong. An enticing e-mail promises to help make your Web site show up at the top of search results pages through an automated service that, for $50 to $100, will list your business in 100 to 250 search engines.

But in reality, while such a service may submit your Web address to all those search engines, few actually will impact your bottom line. That's because the more important search engines will be highly unlikely to move you up in the rankings very far or for very long. To do that, you'll need to pay consistent attention to your listings and have a real person monitor it.

"I still don't believe that there is a $25 to $50 Web listing service that isn't throwing your money away," said Jay Good, president of the Web marketing consulting firm Good Interactive.

Molly Smoller, director of marketing for the North Carolina-based technical school operator Bradford Schools, agrees. "It's easy to say you do search engine optimization, but there's a lot of science to it. We track everything, including which keywords were responsible for getting us the people who requested additional information."

To accomplish such tracking, Web marketers resort to analytics -- a fuzzy science in which the Web site operator collects the data about how visitors find the Web site, move between pages and create various types of requests. It's sort of a quid pro quo, said Mr. Good, in which you can collect better data from visitors if you can give them something of value in return.

But, he adds, the stakes have gone up in the last few years. You need to give site visitors more than ever before to get the same amount of information from them.

The tools that can do that are getting better -- and more widely available. When Google started offering analytical tools for free, the company received so many requests that it had to limit the number of users. Ms. Smoller was one of the lucky few that downloaded Google Analytics, but she still uses other analysis tools that she bought.

Robbin Steif, president of local Web marketing consulting firm Lunametrics, notes that while analytics tools that collect logs of pages people have opened "have been around forever,'' newer versions can better track what users of the site actually do.

Combining the older and newer tools, she said, can give a better snapshot of user behavior and provide more channels to communicate with customers.

Rick Gardinier, senior vice president and managing director of Downtown-based online marketing firm bbdigital, starts his tracking process before the user even visits his clients' Web sites, using special software that starts with the original click on one of his client's ads on a different publisher's Web site. Such tracking helps determine which publishers are creating the sales.

"A click from one publisher or keyword might give you more traffic than from another," he says.