(the following is a guest post from Jeremy Rivera)
Locality is something that for generations has defined how effective a business can be, and has played into decisions by businesses and companies on where they place their brick and mortar locations. With the evolution of the internet, and the growing use of mobile devices, you might think off the cuff that this would decrease the importance of a business's actual location. However, location still plays a vital role even though we're entering an online age where customers could just as easily be from next door as in the next state.
Define your Location by finding your Niche
Each category of business has started to see more and more specialization, more and more websites that focus on a particular topic. This leads to more and more opportunity for the small business owner to get even more free advertising space as these niche verticals need community and business owner participation in order to become more successful. A couple of examples would be Urban Spoon, Menu Pages or Restaurants.com. These represent the new online branding through user feed-back that is becoming more and more important
When the web was young, back in the dark ages of dial-up and Mosaic, the big stat was "hits". Everyone had a counter on their home page, and everyone sold, or tried to sell, advertising based on the number of hits on their site. It was soon discovered that hits are a worthless metric. A hit is simply a request made of the server, so a page with 100 images on it generated at least 101 hits every time it was loaded. And the counters on most home pages could easily be padded by hitting the page refresh over and over.
Fortunately advertisers and webmasters learned quickly that when counting traffic there are only two numbers that matter, visitors and unique visitors. Both types are valuable for different reasons, and a website that can grow to a place where people want to return over and over again is less tied to the whims of the search engines.
To that list, we can add RSS news feed subscribers, newsletter subscribers, even the number of comments a simple blog post may get.
The problem with these benchmarks/metrics though is that none of them mean much when it comes time to pay the bills. You can have all the traffic, all the subscribers, even all the hard core fans you want, but if they don't convert in to sales, what's the point?
It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's Google Personalized Publishing!
Have you ever purchased a magazine only to be frustrated that it only had a few articles of interest? Did you ever think you could make a better one? Well, fear not my faithful minions; Google is going to give you that chance. That’s right, your very own publication. You can choose the topics, choose all the content and even pick which advertisements (or none at all) that are in your on-demand point-of-sale printed ‘personalized publication’. That’s right my fine peeps… now you can be the editor in chief.
In case you didn’t notice, I tend to cover SEO and Internet Marketing around here, not publishing and related advertising. There was a patent that came out from the good ship Google yesterday that I simply couldn’t pass up. It is a system that allows you to create your own magazine or eZine, depending on your preference; and if I do say so myself, that is pretty freaking interesting.
The system revolves around document processing, and, more interestingly, the customization/personalization of content and advertisements in various publication formats; e.g., print form (e.g., newspapers, magazines, books, etc.), electronic form (e.g., electronic newspapers, electronic books ("e-Books"), electronic magazines.
I don’t want your business! Really, it’s true... That is something I have said, not in so few words, to many prospects that come to me for SEO (and other) services. Truth be told, I probably turn away some 90+% of the projects that trickle in. Am I having some sort of an adverse reaction to more 000’s in my bank account? Have I finally flipped out from being a rant-o-holic? No - on all counts; You see, I have long been a proponent of the 80/20 rule, which for our purposes we’ll state as ‘20% of your clients are responsible for 80% of your grief’. A liberal interpretation, but I am sure Pareto won’t mind.
What is important to get digested, is that you can lose a vast amount of time dealing with those ‘clients from Hell’ and other less than palatable situations. This can be cured through simple diligence and pre-qualifying of potential donors (to my bank account that is).
When it comes to qualifying clients you are trying to establish the best scenarios in which you have the highest likelihood of not only being profitable, but being successful. By that I mean leaving behind a legacy to be proud of, a client gleaming with joy for having known you and a website that purrs like a kitten snuggled up to a warm bowl of milk.
There can be a variety of reasons that a prospective SEO client is shown the door;
I came across a post about some recent Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (or SEMPO) data released from their "State of Search Engine Marketing" survey over at Search Engine Land. I thought I post some quick hits – and thoughts – for ya’ll to ponder.
The survey focused on ‘spending trends on paid placement, paid inclusion, organic search engine optimization (SEO) and SEM’ with North American advertisers. North America still represents the majority of search marketing spent in the Global marketplace.
Apparently Search Marketing continues to erode traditional marketing channels – obviously offline marketing taking the biggest hit. Unfortunately for the freelance or small SEO provider, much of that increase is being spent on ‘in-house’ staffing than it is on outsourced. This means some potential tightening up and consolidation within the SEO industry itself.
Business Bits
When the web was young, back in the dark ages of dial-up and 
pick which advertisements (or none at all) that are in your on-demand point-of-sale printed ‘personalized publication’. That’s right my fine peeps… now you can be the editor in chief. 
flipped out from being a rant-o-holic? No - on all counts; You see, I have long been a proponent of the 
