Remember phone books? You know, those big heavy things that take up all that room on your bookshelf.

They still get delivered to us each year, but they’ve started getting smaller, not bigger. That’s because more businesses are moving their advertising budget onto the internet.

That makes sense when you consider that people are spending more time on the internet, and the ability to search is literally at their fingertips. Younger people especially are more likely to search online, rather than get out the big heavy books and wade through all the pages looking for something that could be found virtually instantaneously using Google.

Those Yellow Pages ads aren’t cheap, and they have to be renewed each year. Ok, so a website is often not that cheap either, but a basic online presence can be achieved at less cost than a yellow pages ad, and can continue to work for you year on year, as well as being accessible the world over.

As people transition from spending time offline, to spending more of their time online, you should consider increasing your online marketing budget to successfully engage your online customers.

Everyone uses Google to search, but are you being efficient and getting the best results? Here are some tips you can use to increase your search productivity:

Leave out small words like the, or and of unless it is part of a title or famous phrase, like to be or not to be. Searching for how long is a piece of string achieves mostly the same result as how long piece string.

Searches are case insensitive. So searching for fred, Fred and FRED will deliver the same result.

To search for an exact phrase or sequence of words, enclose it in double quotes. Searching for engaging online educational resource brings up amazon.com, whereas “engaging online educational resource” brings up something altogether different!

Lastly, to see how many pages of your website are in Google’s database, prefix your website address with ‘site:’ like this site:www.yourwebsite.com.