Spotting bad SEO companies

Beware - there are a lot of companies and individuals claiming to be offering ‘SEO’ services, some of these are amateurs and some are outright con-artists. Here are some good indicators you can use to spot those who are NOT going to provide you with a good SEO service.

1. Guaranteed Top 10 Position

No one can guarantee a top ten position for the phrases that are really important to you, although you can put a lot of work in to try to make your site successful, it’s simply down to Google, not you or us, to decide (with their automatic system) which sites are the most worthy of placing highly. More often than not, to get these high positions requires a lot of work over a long period of time.

So how can people promise a guaranteed top ten position?

We’ve found two different ways this works:

Firstly, a SEO company will come to you and tell you the phrase or phrases that they will optimize for. They may sound useful but in many cases they will specifically choose key phrases that they know are not likely ot have much competition, so they have little work to prove their case. So, you may be a solicitors practicing in Birmingham, but instead of ‘Birmingham Solicitors’ or ‘Solicitors in Birmingham’ they would suggest that you go for a phrase such as ’solicitor office in birmigham b6′ - because currently (August 2005) there are only four results for this, so assuming they can get you listed for this they can guarantee your place! But who would actually search for this? Very few people.

Secondly, and just as common, there is a scam where they will fax you a sheet asking for ten keywords that you wish to be placed in top ten results for. You send them a cheque with the filled-in fax, and they ask you to wait up to two months to see the results. Of course, within two months their company has dissapeared. On the examples of this I have seen the only contact number is a mobile phone number.

2. Official Google Partner/Link with Google/Special Deal with Google

A common lie that some SEO-frauds say is that they have a special arrangement/official partner with Google that can guarantee you a good placement. There simply is no such thing. Google (and other search engines) are rightly proud of the independence of their search results, a search ranking cannot be bought or agreed with Google. The system is automatic, and we have to work hard to earn a high place.

3. Automatically submit your site to 100+ search engines

How many search engines do you use? There are less than ten major search engines that most sites need to submit to, a few more if you want to do business in China or other areas, but even these need to have a careful approach to ensure content is valid for the area or your submission will be pointless. Also, most modern search engines do not allow automatic submissions, so when you see a company offering an automatic submission process, check the small print and you will see that these 100 search engines consist mostly of sites you have never heard of, and some of the most vital and important search engines are not included. Many of these smaller search engines that you get automatically submitted to end up doing nothing more than scanning your new website looking for email addresses to add to their spam email lists. We submit by hand, and we do it properly.

4. Re-submit your site every week/month.

Some SEO companies make you think you need to resubmit your site every week/month - they often word this in a way that makes you think you need to keep paying them a regular monthly fee or you will fall out of the search engines. For a well-designed site there is simply no need for this. Google will keep visiting your site regularly and there is no need to try to push it to visit your site more often.