Our essential guide to improving your site's search resultsFor Ron Adolf, something was missing every time he searched Google for a jeweler in Richmond, Va.: his store."I was seeing my competitors," he says. "But we weren't showing up."Eventually his ad agency persuaded him to enlist a local company, Big Oak, to goose his site's rankings. It didn't take long before his rivals, as he puts it, "knocked off" from Google's top spot.But even more important, his competition didn't just go down, he went up, and now AdolfJewelers.com has become a site for more eyes. Whereas it used to lure a paltry 30 visitors a day, now it draws about 200—a sixfold increase.Adolf has become a believer in search engine optimization (SEO), the increasingly important, difficult-to-explain-to-your-­grandmother field devoted to winning a search engine's attention. The rise of SEO is a testament to the ongoing pow