When you started to think about moving your business online, even if just as a digital billboard advertising your retail outlet or professional service, you were doubtless inundated with expert advice. Your site was likely built by one of these ostensible experts and today serves as a lonely outpost, producing the occasional customer.

Here's the unfortunate reality: Odds are very good that your web designer has led you astray. Not through any fault of their own, but because web designers and developers have a bad habit of being focused on how things look rather than how things actually work.

Worrying about pretty graphics was a fine strategy a few years ago, but as Google and other sophisticated search engines have grown in importance, the need for websites that are built around content, about what rather than how, has become critical. In a nutshell, your business website needs to be focused on what you're selling.

Think of the World Wide Web as a vast information ocean, with millions of hooks floating just under the surface, waiting for your potential customer to seek your product or service. Successful business sites are based upon maximizing both the value of their hooks and the number of hooks; to have optimal page design for findability and as many pages with legitimate, relevant content as possible.

If you aren't already viewing your site as an information resource then chances are very good that every time a customer searches for your product, your competitor is closing the deal and leaving you out in the cold.

The good news is that it's not about spending money. Solving this problem isn't about splashy and expensive advertising campaigns or signs on Fifth Avenue and along Rodeo Drive. It's about rethinking what it means to be an online business in the twenty-first century, and that's exactly what The Complete Idiot's Guide to Growing Your Business with Google will help you do, in great detail.

Don't just flip to the chapters that sound good, however. Read through all the material; study this as if there's an exam at the end. In fact, there is a test, the test of what results your business sees after applying the hundreds of smart ideas found in this book.

Like any competitive field, there are dangers lurking and unscrupulous consultants and self-appointed experts who will offer you help in this regard, too. Beware! Their help can end up with your site quite literally vanishing from the major search engines forever. I don't need to tell you the consequences of that happening and its impact on your business!

While reading this book, I hope you will rethink your business web presence. I include extensive and widely varied examples for just that purpose, demonstrating time and again how literally any business, from a plumber to a gas station, can reap significant benefits from a thoughtful, findable, content-centric online presence.

And I bet you'll have fun in the process, too!