In the movie, Raising Arizona, there was a gnarly character played by Tex Cobb describing to Nathan Arizona about his ability to find babies. Remarking on the police's inablity to find Nathan Arizona's kidnapped son, Tex's best line was, "If you want to find a baby, call me. If you want to find a donut, call cop."

I've been surprised to see where people go to find experts. We just had a client quit doing search engine optimization with us and went with a company that promised to put them at the top of the search engine lists. If I was a business owner, I would want this, too. But what these other companies don't tell you is that they'll put you at the top of the list, but on search terms that nobody is searching for. I could be on the top of Google for the term, "red shiny widgets," but if nobody is searching for that term, then it does me no good.

When we start doing search engine optimization or pay per click marketing, one of the first thing we do is research what terms people are using to find a site like the one our client has. We sometimes come up with hundreds of terms, and these terms differ greately in the amount of times they are searched for. Then we figure what the competition is like for that term. Once we figure this out, we start optimizing pages and putting together advertisements for the pay per click.

If you want to get free traffic to your site from phrases that people are actually looking for. If you want to find a donut, well, you know who to ask.