Research questions: This tutorial aims to answer two general questions: (1) What contributes to search engine rankings? and (2) What can web content creators and webmasters do to make their content and sites easier to find by audiences using search engines? Key concepts: Search engines' rankings are shaped by three classes of participants: search engine companies and programmers, search engine optimization practitioners, and search engine users. Key lessons: By applying three key lessons, professional communicators can make it easier for audiences to find their web content through search engines: (1) consider their web content's audiences and website's competitors when analyzing keywords; (2) insert keywords into web text that will appear on search engine results pages, and (3) involve their web content and websites with other web content creators. Implications: Because successful search engine optimization requires considerable time, professional communicators should progressively apply these lessons in the sequence presented in this tutorial and should keep up to date with frequently changing ranking algorithms and with the associated changing practices of search optimization professionals.

This paper explores the extent to which technical communication businesses with Websites are attempting to reach an audience of prospective clients through an intermediary audience of search engines. It draws on a survey of 240 principals of these businesses, brief interviews with half of them, and an analysis of their sites. Results show that search engines are among the most helpful methods leading people to these business sites and that higher levels of such search engine helpfulness are strongly associated with higher percentages of clientele who originate through these sites. Most businesses take search engines into account at least minimally; however, meaningfully pursuing that audience requires ongoing investments that some technical communication businesses are reluctant to make.

This article questions how professional communication genres already well established in print form have been changing as they are transplanted into digital media like the Web. Whereas some technology-oriented genre research has sought how a new medium provides genres with new technological features, this article argues that a more insightful approach would seek how a new medium, together with its users, provides genres with new rhetorical situations. To operationally define rhetorical situations, I adapt Lloyd Bitzer's three situational dimensions of exigence, audience, and constraints. Then, to illustrate how the new rhetorical situations of the Web can influence a genre, I explore the genre of the résumé. Drawing on a survey of 100 Web résumé authors and an analysis of their sites, I show that as each of the three dimensions of the résumé's traditional rhetorical situation has opened itself to greater diversity on the Web, the Web version of the résumé genre has correspondingly reoriented itself. Hence, genres change in response not just to the new medium's technology per se but to the new rhetorical situations that the medium hosts.

A genre's continuing success after migrating to a new medium may be due in part to whether the genre secures a place within a viable genre system. To explore the role of genre systems, this study examined the well-established genre of the résumé in its new position on self-published Web sites. Results from surveying 100 authors of self-published Web résumés revealed that many respondents used their résumés for the previously overlooked purpose of attracting clients for their self-employment. These self-employed respondents rated their résumés as significantly more useful than did those who had not used their résumés for this purpose. The self-employed were more likely to publicize their sites through such business-related genres as business cards and advertising material, and in turn, their sites drew in communication from more socially distant populations. These alternative publicity measures and communication networks suggest that the self employed were able to situate their Web résumés within viable alternative genre systems.

This article draws on the principles of linguistic theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to analyze and explain discursive diversity in organizational Web pages. Organizational Web sites must typically appeal to multiple audiences, a condition that often results in different discourses being juxtaposed within the same interface. To analyze and explain the effects of such juxtapositions, this article adapts to the Web the principles that Bakhtin developed to conceptualize discursive diversity in the novel, in particular his concept of dialogism. To illustrate their efficacy, the article applies these principles to analyze a pair of government Web sites about forests, the forest industry, and the environment. Whereas the homepages of the two sites project divergent approaches to the discourses of their diverse audiences, a dialogic analysis of the new site's deeper levels reveals how the government's discursive strategy appears to favor one audience at the expense of others. Drawing on this case study, this article discusses how an approach informed by Bakhtin's principles can illuminate our analysis of organizational Web discourse.