Search Engine Crash Course?

So I whipped up a simple site for a small business a few months back, and this morning I recieved an email from him, wondering why when he types in a few keywords about the site/business - google doesn't list him.

If you type the exact name of his business though, he is first on google's results. He wants people to be able to type in "rural appraiser north iowa" or something to that effect I'm guessing, and see his site listed.

I know google doesn't go by metatags, which is also one of the reasons it's such a good search engine. Is there anything I can do in this situation? The site isn't very large, and I think that google indexes you higher if you have alot of links to high-traffic sites?

I'm not exactly sure how this all works, and I'm off to do some searching on the topic, but I just thought I'd check here first. Thanks for any help guys.

It will help his results if he has pertinent text prominately displayed. For instance, if his business is selling ball point pens, he should "Ball Point Pens" placed in the following:

The title bar of the browser.
The meta tags (doesn't hurt)
The title of the webpage
The first words on the page
A handful of times on the page itself. (Go for 5-10, too much is bad as well.)

Links from other sites also help, but that takes time. Make sure his URL is submitted to Google AFTER the above changes are made.

http://benchmarkagribusiness.com/index.html

Well there's the page (don't laugh I'm not a web designer!) - I'll try to make some of the changes you suggested, thanks Wedo.