Businesses of all sizes should take advantage of SEO. SEO is the most affordable and effective strategy for creating qualified business leads Every single day millions of consumers search for services and products to buy online. An SEO campaign can get your business website listed on the first page of Google for keywords related to your products and services. Since the prospect is actively searching for what you offer you can be assured that the leads you get are red hot! Finding a trustworthy seo professional just got a lot easier. Visit the site of 12 year veteran seo consultant Charles Preston. A recent study shows that in 2010 businesses are allocating more of their marketing budget to SEO. It’s no surprise when you consider that search based leads convert to sales almost twice as often. So, how does SEO work exactly? A professional SEO consultant can help you determine what keywords you should target for your website. The keywords need to be relevant to what your business is providing. They also need to be getting at least a few hundred searches per month and they should show “commerial intent”. Commercial intent is the difference between the keyword “insurance” and “buy insurance”. Following keyword selection the pages of your website must be tweaked for the keywords you are going after. Next comes link building. Search engines look at how many links are coming into a website from other websites in order to determine what kind of ranking that website should get. Submitting your site to directories, writing and syndicating articles in addition to publishing online press releases are good ways to build links. How long does it take? Usually 2-3 months of work will start to yield results. When the traffic and leads start coming in you will know that the time and money spent on SEO was a smart choice.