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Growing LI firm focuses on search engine optimization

Andrew Hazen, founder and chief executive of Prime

Photo credit: Newsday / Karen Wiles Stabile | Andrew Hazen, founder and chief executive of Prime Visibility , a business that helps businesses get the notice of Internet search engines. (November 2009)

James Bernstein

Newsday columnist James Bernstein James Bernstein

James Bernstein is a longtime business writer for Newsday.

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Andrew Hazen decided early on that he did not really want to be a lawyer -- like eight weeks after he started practicing.

"I was doing mortgage foreclosures," Hazen, 36, said. "I was throwing people out of their houses. That didn't give me much satisfaction."

But while attending Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Michigan in the 1990s, Hazen had learned about the Internet. He had even started a Web site that provided students with reference sources, and made some money.

Now, Hazen is making more. Lots more. He is founder and president of Prime Visibility Llc in Melville, a search-engine optimization and Internet marketing firm that is one of Long Island's fastest-growing such companies, helping businesses improve their placement on Google and other search sites.

The 10-year-old Prime Visibility is poised for its next growth spurt, Hazen said. The company moved in January 2008 to a 9,000-square-foot office from half that space at a business incubator run by the Long Island Forum for Technology in Bethpage.

It now has about 45 employees, up from five a decade ago. Sales are in the $5 million to $10 million range, up from $2 million in 2006. Prime Visibility added three people last month, and plans to hire three more.

In 2007, Hazen sold Prime Visibility to Steve Rosenberg, who had been president of Universal Studios' television group.

Rosenberg, now Prime Visibility's chief executive, enlisted two equity firms to invest in Prime Visibility, and he said they paid "millions" for the company.

Rosenberg said he came out of "traditional media." When he listened to Hazen describe the business over two years ago, he was stunned. "I didn't even know this kind of company existed," Rosenberg said.

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