I have read in many places that even with the economic downturn, small business will increase its use of online marketing in 2009. Online marketing is a proven and reliable marketing tool and will continue to grow as the technology and marketing methods increase. Combining online marketing correctly with traditional marketing will give any business a competitive advantage.

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Why?

Here are a few reasons why you need to invest in optimization.

Search engines and directories are the most popular method used to find websites. Over 80% of internet users use search engines  as their preferred method for locating websites.

Most web users search the web every day (57%). The only thing done online more is checking email - 81% check email every day.

There are more than 320 million searches made through search engines and directories each day.  The growth of the internet means there are now billions of web pages and this has increased our reliance on search engines as a way of finding these web pages.

Microsoft is releasing their new version of Internet Explorer - IE 8.0. If you use IE 6.0 you should definitely update to 8.0. IE 6.0 is obsolete and less secure. Read a review of IE 8.0.

But you are not stuck with IE browsers, you can to switch to other web browsers, the most popular being Firefox. Download it and give it a try. You may like it better that IE and you might have less technical problems too.