Forum Moderators: phranque
Thank you.
Google adwords is a nice and inexpensive way for them to see their site in Google while you're waiting for G to (a) find them and (b) show up in the listings.
Other than that it's about how you handle yourself with your clients. Keep reading here and try to work out the best way to communicate with them. Try to work out an analogy that they may understand (related to their normal land based business). Not easy but it may come to you.
Offering them the paid Yahoo and Google options as alternatives lets them know you have at least investigated it (and gives them a warm fuzzy feeling).
I remember seeing this topic discussed at length a few months ago but it may have been in the "supporters'" forum.
(and to answer your question) I do not submit to search engines but I still have a go (one go) at DMOZ and I make sure it is in the correct physical location category if the business has a land based address.
Of course after the simple answer it gets more complicated...
If they have given you a marketing budget, buy them a few links, it is, of course, best if you can get them links from relevent sites and good anchor text is used.
If there is no budget:
1. search out some link exchanges, make sure the pages that their link will be placed on is indexed by the search engines by searching for the full url of the link page.
2. use your own sites to "jumpstart" them. I have quite a few sites under my control on a wide variety of topics, when I build a new site for a client I put a link to the new site on an older established site that if possible, is somewhat on target with the new site.
Once the new site has been crawled a few times I take the link off my site.
Hope this helps.