The Internet is a haven of scam artists and predators, and some gurus would have you believe that the plethora of SEO companies out there are nearing the top of the list. They’ll assure you that you can do it all yourself, and that these ‘experts’ are only there to rip you off and keep you from reaching your full potential.

Unfortunately, they are either lying, or they are just plain wrong. It is in their interest to lie, after all — by preventing you from getting a good start in your online business, they keep the competition to a dull roar. The truth is that hiring a group to do your SEO services has several powerful advantages, and your chances of getting scammed are very minimal.

That’s not to say that every job will end up perfect — there are always disasters, misunderstandings, and so forth — but by and large, the SEO industry is just about as honest as they come. Provided, of course, you’re working with an established company that has a reputation to maintain and not some fly-by-night fresh startup that could fold tomorrow — or, God forbid, a bunch of freelancers you pulled off of ODesk.

You see, SEO companies today are like the people who went to sell shovels to Gold Rush miners. They didn’t ever hit it big, but they gave other people the tools to succeed, and in doing so, they got by. What they did have, however, was a product that was dependable, functional, and useful. That’s the definition of modern-day SEO services.

They’re dependable because you can count on a good SEO company to get you ranking for keywords. Maybe not the highest-competition, maybe not the longest tail, but you can depend on them to get organic traffic flowing to your site.

They’re functional because they allow you to function, by taking the workload of SEO off of your hands. Without SEO companies, every webmaster in the world would be working 80 hour weeks just to tread water in terms of rankings.

They’re useful because without them, you won’t attain a reasonable level of organic traffic, and that means you have to get your traffic from someplace that will cost money for a long time to come.

All of the major search engines offer the option of registering your business with their local directory. It makes sense if you’re running a business where your location matters, like a retail store with a physical address, but if you’re a virtual service that does business anywhere it may not do you any good. We make that determination on a case by case basis, including local internet marketing when it will help our client. For those instances when it is not needed, we concentrate on national and international markets.

The term “local internet marketing” is fairly broad. It can be used to describe local directory submissions, registrations with programs like Google Maps, or posting on electronic bulletin boards that have a local following. We do all of the above and more for our clients that want to build a local presence. We also include geo-specific keywords in our organic SEO efforts. If you’re a retail store that sells pet supplies in Los Angeles, we don’t just target the keyword “pet supply”, we incorporate various derivatives of “Los Angeles pet supplies”.

Internet marketing is all about understanding what your potential customers will be searching for on the web. When they want to buy your products or services, what keywords are they putting into the search box? If they enter “pet supplies” they’ll get three or four pages of national chains before they start to hit the local guys like you. There’s no way for small businesses to compete with that, so we offer small business SEO that we use to target keywords you have a shot to be on Page One for, like “dog leashes in Los Angeles”. Our clients get better numbers when we do things like that.

Each business is different. Your niche market and the mediums we need to focus on to reach that market determines how we will structure your organic SEO and internet marketing campaigns. We’ve been in business since the internet first went live, so we know what it takes to be successful. Local internet marketing is one strategy, but definitely not our only one. We have dozens more in our arsenal and we’ll pull out all of them if necessary to get you to the top of search engine Page One.

Most internet marketing strategies have two sets of myths attached to them. The first is the most common – over-inflation of statistics. That’s where hundreds become thousands and thousands becomes tens of thousands. The second is disparity – putting things in a negative light and saying they don’t work. Both have been applied to article writing and distribution. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. Claims of massive traffic flow from one article mass submitted are no truer than those that declare article marketing is a huge waste of time. If it was, why do we get such great results from it?

A few months back, Google made some changes in their algorithm that made publishing duplicate content either on your website or in multiple article directories an obsolete practice. If you want quality links now, you’ll have to write original articles and content pages and link them manually to internal pages on your website. This is the way we have always done it, so the change didn’t affect our clients. In fact, we’d been expecting the change for some time. It was necessary to improve the quality of information on the web. Far too much garbage content has been published in recent years.

There are those in our industry who claim to be organic SEO “experts” because they’ve been able to use auto-submitters to build links at a rapid pace for their clients. These charlatans are now running for cover as Google invalidates all of their work and client sites disappear from search pages. It’s evidence that short cuts simply do not work. Articles that were written by legitimate writers and submitted to reputable sites are still good for the back links they produce. Those other auto-generated, scrambled, spun, and kindergarten-level bodies of text aren’t worth anything and won’t be seen by searchers any time soon. Web surfers will now get quality when they search, as they should.

One article on a product or service will bring you on average about fifty page views. Writing about current events could get you several hundred. If you have an anchor text link in the body, expect about a 2% click-through rate. Those aren’t big numbers, so you need to write hundreds of articles to see a recognizable change in your traffic volume. That will come with time. The link juice comes immediately. Every article counts, as long as it’s original, quality, and submitted to a legitimate directory.

That press release looked great when you proofed it. It had lots of flowery language and seemed to get to the point with those cool quotes. It was nice to see your name on something that was gong to be seen by thousands of people, wasn’t it? Your press release service told you to expect a huge influx of new traffic once they released it, but that was days ago and nothing is coming in. What happened? It appears that you may have been deceived into expected better results than you got. Don’t worry. You’re not alone, and you probably paid a reduced price for that press release. It could be worse.

There are press release services out there that are nothing more than hack writers submitting to free sites that don’t get you any recognition at all. If no one sees your press release, how are you going to get traffic back to your website? Most of those free sites are bulletin boards that get no traffic. When it comes to PR, you get what you pay for. If you want to see an increase in visitors, you need to get your press release out on a major newswire. That’s what we do for our clients.

The other factor in press release response rate is the subject. Use one to promote an upcoming sale and you’ll get a better customer response than releasing a statement about an employee being promoted. The marketing philosophy of your new CFO might be of interest to investors, but your customers don’t care about it. They want to know about products and services and when they can buy them for less. Nothing gets better results than an invitation to save money. It’s one of the best local internet marketing strategies there is. We use it all the time.

Who wrote that press release that you got lousy results with? If you’re trying to reach an American market, the use of colloquial English is important if you’re going to connect. Forced or foreign sounding words and phrases will turn the reader right off. You can hire a service in India or the Philippines to do your writing for you, but expect the results that come with those low prices. We use US writers and established distribution channels for our press releases. If you had hired us to write the one you’re wondering about right now, you wouldn’t be questioning what went wrong. You’d be answering customer inquiries and filling orders instead.