Customers searching for the Web site of a company with a generic business name are likely to cast a net too wide to find what they're after. In many cases, there may be no telling who -- or what -- will rise to the surface. For entrepreneurs seeking to improve their search results, the experience is often a crash course in the nuts-and-bolts of search algorithms.

When Kim Johnson started her own clothing label in 2001, designing tailored, 1940s-inspired dresses, she named it Johnson because the name connoted a classic "American generic-ness." She chose JohnsonShop.com as the Web address or Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for her New York City-based business, instead of JohnsonClothing.com, because Johnson Shop sounded warmer, she says she thought.

In 2004, Johnson Clothing by stylist Kirsten Johnson (no relation to Kim Johnson) snagged the JohnsonClothing.com Web address. Google searches for "Johnson clothing" now overwhelmingly return hits for the Kirsten Johnson lines as well as those for New York fashion designer Betsey Johnson. Kim Johnson's Web site doesn't appear until page 14 of results on Google, only after hits that include the Ben Johnson, Angela Johnson and Jimmie Johnson clothing lines.

But JohnsonShop.com's ranking can be raised, search-engine experts say, with some tech savvy and smart press relations, even if the field is crowded with the similar names.

Take, for example, Paul Allen.

Not Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, but Internet entrepreneur Paul Allen, of Provo, Utah, whose technology and marketing blog in a recent search was the third Google listing in a search for "Paul Allen," after the philanthropist billionaire's personal site and Wikipedia entry.

The 41-year-old Mr. Allen, a managing member of Internet incubator Provo Labs and founding chief executive officer of Ancestry.com, was once the 50th or so Google result for "Paul Allen," he says.

But that was two or three years ago, before he started his blog under the nickname "Paul Allen, the Lesser."

"It turns out that when you're a blogger, and you're blogging every day, people link to you. Those links help you in your search rankings,"he says. "Every bit of this ranking came from my own blogging efforts and nothing else."

"A lot of Web sites don't have a clue how Google works," says Mr. Allen, who sold his Web marketing firm, 10x Marketing, in 2005.

What happens when a company chose its name before considering search-engine rankings?

Goods for Good, a fledgling New York City-based nonprofit, obtains surplus children's products from U.S. corporations and ships them to AIDS orphans and other children in the developing world. Last spring, founder Melissa Kushner, 26, was more concerned about whether the name was available for incorporation than whether it would make a good Web address.

Finding her first choice of domain name and a few of its derivations taken, Ms. Kushner tacked on "international" to her domain name.

Now, GoodsforGoodInternational.com is buried under pages of unrelated search hits. (The phrase "goods for good" occurs in merchandising sites and is the name of a news aggregator. It also shows up in some natural language searches, such as "Looking to trade goods for good corn.")

Ms. Kushner says that friends and colleagues have taken to adding her last name to search queries. She won't consider revising her nonprofit's name, because, she says, it so aptly captures her work. Instead, she is learning searching strategies from Web developer friends and is working to buy related domains, such as the .net and .com iterations of her domain. She is also negotiating to buy the goodsforgood.org domain from the current owner, she says.

"I'm pretty married to the name," Ms. Kushner says. "But I don't feel that our problem is insurmountable."

Some entrepreneurs opt to discard their generic names for unclaimed spaces.

Like Paul Allen, software developer Phil Burns entered an already crowded Internet space. Too late to score the PhilBurns.com or Phil.com Web addresses, he opted to create Phil801.com by combining his first name and Utah area code. He says the URL is easy for contacts to remember.

"I was able to grab my name because I had come up with a unique moniker. Now if you Google Phil801, I pretty much own the space," he says.

Some folks shrug off the Web anonymity that a generic moniker brings.

Olivier Alary, the Montreal-based composer behind a collaborative electronica music project called Ensemble, named his band in 1998. In 2006, a critic called the outfit "unGoogleable."

While the first 45 pages of a recent Google search for "Ensemble music" turned up only a sole review on the 25th page, Mr. Alary's site is on the first results page on a search for "ensemble."

Mr. Alary, who has worked with singer/songwriters Bjork and Cat Power, celebrates the hard-to-locate results. "It's a balance between pragmatism and art," Mr. Alary says. This disregard of marketing is part of the electronica's ethos, he says, noting that the French band Air is similarly hard to find. (To further confuse things, there is also a Japanese band Air.)

Ms. Johnson is philosophical about her search-engine results. "I like that I'm anonymous but not that the store is," Ms. Johnson says. For a time, she considered renaming her line, but she didn't want to risk losing loyal customers.

Still, if she had to name her label all over again, she says, "I'd pick something more unique."