Amanda C. Kooser

Display ads are so yesterday. Check out these alternative tools for expanding your company's advertising campaigns into new venues.

Your web startup needs to cut through the clutter and reel in customers, and search engine optimization (SEO) can be just the ticket. SEO helps improve your search rankings so your website shows up higher on Google, Yahoo and other popular search engines. "SEO is really [fundamental]. It should be a line item when you're developing your website," says Greg Bozigian, founder and chief media officer of new media marketing company Visionary View.

Know Your Tools

You'll hear a lot of jargon around SEO. This glossary will keep you in the know.

All those business bits and bytes add up, and finding ways to store them can be a constant challenge. Most entrepreneurs will turn to a combination of storage technologies ranging from USB flash drives to full-on network storage systems. We used to talk about storage mainly in gigabytes (GB), but we've now magnified that into terabytes (TB). The onward march of storage technology is turning in bigger storage, more advanced features and lower prices for growing businesses.

The Dell PowerVault MD3000i iSCSI SAN is a Storage Area Network (SAN) system with some muscle to handle more sophisticated storage needs while still working with your existing Ethernet network. Dell's iSCSI solution is a more affordable option than the Fibre Channel systems that have dominated the SAN market. With expandability up to 45TB, it gives a business plenty of room to grow. The $1,400 Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ RND4210 is a 2TB Network-Attached Storage (NAS) solution tucked into a compact appliance. It's stuffed with user-friendly features like printer sharing, built-in backup, system monitoring and automatic alerts.

As pocketbooks tighten in the slow economy, online consumers look to shop smarter, seeking out product recommendations and low prices. Internet startups are taking note, looking beyond the realm of price comparison search engines and offering innovative ways to assist online buyers.

Deal-finding sites and online coupon aggregators have long been popular, but few shopping-related web companies are as ambitious in scope as ThisNext (thisnext.com). Founder Gordon Gould, 38, launched the Santa Monica, California, social shopping service in 2006. "We see [our site] as one large node on a network of product recommendations that exist across the whole social web," says Gould. "We have the opportunity to be the market leader and the de facto standard for how people give and get product recommendations."