SEO is a burning-hot-phrase right now, and it means different things, depending on who's saying it. The proper goal of SEO should be what is known as "organic growth" in search engine lingo (note that "search engine" is not just Google), and it results in sustainable results in the search engines, but it also requires an investment of time and energy to sustain.

It's funny how these farming analogies come to mind. To grow your site organically, you have to plant it like a garden. Every web garden needs variety, and it needs to be appropriate to it's raison de etre. For example, a landscaper that would probably want a site that is not a produce farm, with products on every tree. Similarly, a landscaper doesn't want to a website that is strictly a botanical garden either.

Look-but-don't-touch sites are less endearing than those on which users can setup accounts, login, leave comments, ask questions, etc.. A website should be more than a marketing brochure, but rather a website that allows people to interact with the things that make your business unique in it's service area. For a landscaper this might mean sections on native plants, a general FAQ section, a bright, informative blog that allows the owner's personality, interests and talent to come to the attention of people looking for information. The possibilities for attracting traffic are endless, but the trick to success is providing real, useful information to potential clients.

Most of your client captures will come from people looking for information on how to do things themselves. With that thought in mind, you should remember the First Law of Blogging: Blogging by itself will never make you rich.

So how does SEO work?

First: Generally speaking, you can only remain well ranked on search engines by having other sites refer to and link to your site. Simply cleaning up and properly submitting your site's information will bring you to the top of the results temporarily, and will keep you there for fairly specific searches - in our example: "landscape designer" "woodland hills" : returns the client's name personal name around result 10, but the website doesn't appear at all.

We can fix that easily.

Second: To maintain rankings, you need other people to use your site as a reference.

That means you need a plethora of content specific to the types of things that your "potential clients" will be searching for, so that other websites, over time, refer to your website as a great place to go "for more information". It takes time, and it is a significant investment over time.

True SEO work usually means making a few minor changes to the construction of your website so that the search engines can "crawl" the site properly. Unfortunately, for most people, that doesn't mean they auto-magically float to the top of "landscape designer" on Google. Staying at the top requires following up with fresh, pertinent, original content.

"Black Hat" SEO is what most people really want when they say they want to "get SEO'd", especially when they are in a competitive field. Unfortunately, Search Engine Optimization as an industry is very often a scam cashing in on people's misconceptions and/or lack of scruples.

In a nutshell, when you hire a "Black Hat" you pay a company to trick the search engine into thinking you have an interesting site that people read and reference. This is accomplished by populating a network of "zombie sites" (which contain only bogus content scraped from other websites) with thousands of (bogus) links to your customer's website. It is this behavior which fills our search results with hits like "san-fernando-valley-area-homes.com" and "articles.directory.com" which point to USELESS articles like this:

SHOULD YOU ADD SERVICES? Woodland Hills CA - The decision may seem like an easy one, but it's not a slam dunk. Some analysis and discussion are in order as sometimes less is more.

Note that this is not what the gents at Google work hard to find, rather they look for genuinely interesting sites that genuine people genuinely read and reference. "SEO'd sites" are NOT what they want. Most of the time buying SEO is buying something from someone that they don't really have to sell. I can't sell you results on Google's website, no matter what i promise you. Only Google can do that, and they call it "Adwords". It's a monthly fee.

Once you have good, fresh content, your site will naturally (or "organically" as we say in the biz) float to the very tip top of all search engine's results, not just Google's, whether anybody ever visits it or not.

Here's why: "Black Hat SEO" is really a product for people in a competitive environment with product(s) to sell. When you need to sell widgets you need to get listed in top results when people search for widgets or you're out of the game. When many people sell widgets, you sometimes have to resort to whatever means are necessary to get top results... nowadays there's a cottage industry of "SEO Company" guys are out there propositioning everyone with a domain name, but it's a fools game, as the recent CLOSURE of Alexa by Amazon attests.

Fortunately for you, in most cases your competition isn't nearly as thick. A well thought out website with a hundred or so articles will draw a significant amount of traffic to your site, and will bring your business to the attention of people looking for your services.

It's not a simple subject.