Like many other business, Restek has taken advantage of the Web as an order channel in recent years. Kent Rauch, the company's Webmaster, says that Restek launched e-commerce capabilities in late 2000, and since then the results have been encouraging. "In 2003, we had a 20 percent increase in sales from last year," Rauch reveals. "The online portion of that is over a 50 percent increase."

In other words, online sales are growing at a faster pace than traditional sales. Indeed, in any given month, about five to ten percent of customers placing orders with Restek are new accounts coming in through the online channel, according to Rauch.

Consequently, Restek sees the value of paying more attention to the website as a tool for increasing overall sales. This year, Rauch was given more staff resources for the Web, and also empowered to find ways to make the Restek website more visible.

In order to do so, Restek chose to work with visibility specialist MoreVisibility.com. How does the arrangement work? It's certainly not pay-for-placement, Rauch says. "I have a moral objection that. I won't click on sponsored links." Instead, MoreVisibility.com takes key keywords and phrases that Rauch draws up as the basis for Restek campaigns and tailors them for greater visibility on different search engines like Google, AOL, MSN, and so on.

Since deploying MoreVisibility.com, Rauch has seen higher exposure rates for Restek keywords -- 20 percent and higher. This means that, without MoreVisibility.com, thousands of searches a month would fail to turn up the company as a potential supplier.

Given how much business comes in over the Web, and the rate of increase for Web sales, Rauch is confident that more visibility for Restek will translate directly into more dollars for the bottom line. "We've seen a nice inflation in the rate of many [search] terms," he concludes.