Everyone that owns a website needs SEO these days.

This should be your overall theme when you are preparing yourself for a meeting with a local business owner that is in dire need of a website. But not only in the need of a website, but also in dire need of getting that web site to be visible to the people of that area that are using City/Service or City/Product keyword phrases as there search queries. Having a web site isn’t enough these days. You need a web site that is either going to land at the top of the SERPs or a web site that is created with an amazing landing page for when people click on the AdWords ads that you have set up for your pay per click ad campaign.

When you are at a meeting with a local business owner, whether it be the owner of an Arlington air conditioning company, or a winery in Northern Michigan, you want to make sure you stick to these following points throughout the whole meeting.

You want to be as forth coming as possible. Do not try to hide any of the SEO tactics you use to get to the top of the SERPs. There is no point to. Local business owners don’t have enough time to take part in Do-It-Yourself SEO, and even if what you are saying to them seems like it’s easy enough to understand, it all starts sounding like rocket science jargon once you start mentioning things like link building.

Try to be as simple as possible. They aren’t going to understand you when you start saying words like “algorithm.” To them, that just sounds like a made up word. Start with phrases like: “Well SEO is just a point system Google uses to determine which web sites should be at the top of the search engine results pages (don’t say “SERPs”)” and “Whoever has the most information on the web gets to be at the top.”

Be prepared for things to get a little shaky, but be able to bounce back. Is the company currently in the works with someone else that is handling there web development or SEO? If so, don’t be taken back if they get on the phone right then and there and start asking questions. This is just another reason that you should be up front because you never know the local business owners background with SEO.

Be very honest about your process and what you are charging for every aspect of your business. Break down all aspects of the process of getting the stie developed to getting it to the top of the SERPs and everything in between. What do you charge for graphics? What do you charge for a custom CMS (content management system)? What do you charge for your initial web design or custom template? Are you going to be writing the content? Will there be monthly SEO fees? Most importantly, don’t try to charge three thousand dollars for a simple WordPress theme. Yes, there are many people that get away with this in the Internet marketing field, but that doesn’t mean that you should join the Scam Club.

Each local business situation is completely different and unique. Make sure you talk about ROI and what these owners can expect for their investment. Most importantly, do not guarantee number one rankings to anybody. This is simply a false statement and not even the best SEO’s on the planet can guarantee a feat like this no matter what the niche. Google makes more than 400 algorithm changes a year, and each and every day there is a webmaster out there that is surprised by the change that is made that day. Don’t go ahead and make the same foolish mistake. Besides, that right there is SEO 101 that you do not know what you are talking about.

This article was written by Jet Russell of www.inetzeal.com  Jet helps to run an SEO Company and helps to provide an Article Writing Service along the way. In his spare time he likes to write articles about SEO, SEM, and everything else that has to do with Internet marketing

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Reader: Can you give me a list of directories to submit my blog to?

Gayla: I’ve never used blog directories and some of my blogs have gotten fairly high on the search engines without them. I have focused on using the proper keywords and did just fine.

Reader: Is there any place I can go to learn more about how to use keywords?

Gayla: What I do for keywords is:

Watch Technorati to see what people are searching.

I use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find variations of keywords and phrases.

Example: Say you’re wanting to use the keyword HOLIDAY — the Adwords keyword tool will tell you all the variations of the word holiday in how it was searched recently. I personally try to utilize as many keyword combos as I can with searches of 1,000 or greater. You’d be surprised at just how many visitors you can pull in that way.

Go to the Google Blog Search and see what other blogs similar to yours may be writing about, how they are tagging etc.

Yahoo Buzz is another great place to watch to see what the movers and shakers in the search world are. Try to incorporate as many of those top search terms into your blog posts as you can and tag them as the keywords that are being searched.

Another tip I’ve found to help is by bolding out the keywords within your post. You don’t have to do this on every single occasion, but it does help to do it once in a while. In as much as your eyes will pause on the bolded words, so will search engines.

That’s not saying I’m totally against blog directories — it’s just that I’ve never found the need to spend my time submitting to them.

If someone has an opinion that supports directories, I’d love to hear it.

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There’s no such thing as a free lunch. So make sure you scoff at anyone who tells you something is “free.” If you receive traffic from some place and it costs nothing, but you had to spend 300 hours to generate it, was it free? No, at worst, you could have earned minimum wage for those 300 hours. That is—at worst—it cost you 300 hours multiplied by minimum wage.

At best, you could have been doing something productive with your business that would have earned you ten times more than minimum wage during each of those hours. So don’t listen to this “free traffic generation” nonsense. Even traffic that comes from search engines has a cost – and that’s your time.

Now, with that caveat in mind, there is such thing as relatively cheaper traffic. If it takes you very little time to optimize your search for the search engines—and the result is considerable “organic” search engine traffic—well, great; you should generate traffic through search engine optimization.

In general, traffic that comes from search engine optimization does actually turn out to be quite cheap. In exchange for the time it takes to create some relevant content, use the proper tags, and exchange a few links, you could get a steady flow of several hundred visitors per day to your site.

If your wage is the only cost, this will be relatively cheap in comparison to pay per click traffic, which could cost you several dollars per visitor.

Other than simply being cheap, organic search engine traffic is also good for a number of other reasons. One obvious reason is that you do not have to spend time monitoring the flow of organic SEO traffic for fear that you will exceed your budget.

With PPC, you have to constantly check your Adwords account and other PPC accounts to determine how well your ads are performing. This is not so with organic search engine traffic. And the less time you spend thinking and actually generating traffic, the more you profit per visitor. If you spend your whole day watching statistics and you think you’re in profit – then you’re not adding your own wage to the equation.

Another major benefit to using organic search engine traffic is that it tends to convert better. In fact, many experts would argue that it converts much better than links from “sponsored” sections – even if they are on a search engine.

People tend to be considerably more skeptical of anything that looks like an advertisement. In contrast, if your site comes up as the first non-sponsored result on Google for a particular keyword, you will gain enormous credibility for that fact alone.

Last, there is one other major benefit of organic search engine traffic: high rankings tend to beget high rankings. That is – if you maintain the top position for certain keywords on Google, there’s a good chance sites will start linking to you, as you will be considered an “authority” on your topic.

This will solidify your top ranking and also improve your ranking for other keywords. In this sense, high search engine rankings can beget high search engine rankings.

And there you have it: there are several major benefits to using organic search engine traffic over popular alternatives, such as pay per click traffic.

Even though organic search engine traffic isn’t truly “free”—it costs your time at the very least—it may be considerably cheaper than other forms of traffic generation. Not only will it covert better than “sponsored links,” but it may beget future traffic; and will cost comparatively less.

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