Businesses who are not familiar with search engine optimisation could be missing out in 2010 and in future years, according to Bermuda Internet Marketing (BIM).

BIM's Internet marketing specialist Matt Earle said that companies which had a website and and optimised it for search engines such as Yahoo and Google could be found at all hours of the day by motivated consumers.

Mr. Earle said that firms could easily set up their websites to appeals to a particular niche, with the adverts it carried only shown to people in certain countries, including just to Bermudians.

"For example," said Mr. Earle, "A hotel could set up a special travel banner ad campaign that only shows to New Yorkers reading the travel section of the NY Times and when they click the ads, have it land on a special page on your hotel website saying: 'Tired of the cold winter weather, you could be relaxing at X Hotel in less than two hours'."

Mr. Earle added that website analytics packages enabled companies to tell exactly what keywords, banner ads or websites were generating sales.

"For example if you are running a Google ad campaign for a florist and you are getting clicks from the keyword 'plants Bermuda', you would be able to see that a lot less of these people order flowers than people writing 'flowers Bermuda' and thus, you could immediately shift your advertising dollars to the better performing keyword."

BIM's account manager Lorraine Silvia said that it was both easy and cheap to change direction with an online marketing campaign.

"By watching who's on your website and looking at statistics you know what needs to be adjusted and then normally can adjust without stopping it," she said."You can also see what people are saying about you in comments and online discussions so if you hear bad things you can cut it off before it is too late."

A good website with intelligent content also gives your company credibility, while using freely available online analytics programs, companies have the ability to see what their visitors are searching for to find them, which pages they find interesting and respond to, and a wealth of other information, said Ms Silvia.

Mr. Earle concluded that through Facebook marketing tactics, businesses could make their content easily sharable through various social networking and social bookmarking sites.