The web is a crowded market and your website is a very small part of that market. Getting your website, and therefore your business, noticed in that market can be a difficult and lengthy process.

You or your web developer can put all the right words on the pages, make your content compelling, use all the established methods of optimisation, but you will still have to be patient and wait for your site to climb the organic rankings.

Of course you can buy a place somewhere near the top of a Google results page with an Adwords campaign, with no guarantees the people landing on your site will interact with you. And what happens when you stop the campaign? Your website drops out of sight and is left to make it’s own way organically up the results.

You can buy an SEO service to optimise your website for the keywords and phrases you want to target. You can buy some search engine marketing and social networking services. But beware of the ‘No Value’ service. Look out for:

* A promise to make you top of Google rankings – as impossible as it is unlikely
* A lack of experience or genuine clients – suggests they could be unable to provide the service they claim
* Unable to provide client contacts for reference – suggests worse

The competition for the business you’re after is still there and if your competitors domain has been up for 10 years you have a very steep hill to climb to get onto the same level playing field.

Small businesses and startups really have no other choice than go to a Search Engine Marketing company. Because of the immaturity of their site, slow and steady progress is often the best hope. They just won’t be able to compete with huge multi-nationals who have held the same domain for over a decade, that’s how search engines work.

Without some help from professional agencies, these businesses would struggle to get anywhere. Consumers have chosen the search engine as their tool for locating the information and services they want, that won’t change.

What has all this to do with regulating SEO and search engines?

This article on TechCrunch suggests Google has too much power in the search engine marketing and optimisation world, and some form of regulation is called for.
Personally I don’t agree with this, what is needed is more competition for Google. And awareness on the part of website owners and potential website owners, that having a website isn’t the instant gateway to increased business without some additional work in the marketing department.