I was stopped by a local trader while walking my dogs this morning. Since it is Dia de Andalucia, I was expecting the usual 'bien fiesta' greetings but that wasn't why he stopped me.

He has been getting a few emails from people offering to SEO his web site and was puzzled about what was involved.

Apart from having my walk curtailed, I was peeved that another trader has become ensnared in what seems to be treated as (and called) the offline cash cow.

To put him in the picture, I explained that SEO is an on-going process designed to keep his web site in a high search result position in the search engines - the idea being to get more visitors to his site.

He understood the difference between a visitor and a buyer but still thought it sounded like a good idea.

To demonstrate how strange keywords can be used to obtain a Nº1 position on Google, I wrote a blog post called uppitytowntraders and impressed the hell out of him by having it come up as Nº1 on Google within 7 minutes! It soon dawned on him that not many people, if any, would ever search for uppitytowntraders.

To demonstrate further, I posted coinmobilefishmongers and that, too, was Nº1 on Google within 7 minutes.

That REALLY impressed him! Then I gave him the bad news. Nobody was likely to search for coinmobilefishmongers, they would probably search for coin mobile fishmongers and his site would be nowhere to be found because of the millions of sites related to coins, fish and mobiles.

He re-read my uppitytowntraders post and I have a new client who has seen proof that he will save €112 per month after paying me and understanding that what I am going to do for him will probably find him some new buyers.