The SEO Profession can be a bit of a minefield for the uninitiated. I often get new clients contacting me in desperation either because they have no idea who to trust, or worse, because they’ve been ‘ripped off’ by ‘black hat’ SEO fly-by-nighters.

A few years ago, it was nothing for unscrupulous SEO companies to charge upwards of AUD$5,000 for 20 keywords (true story). So how do you know who’s honest and who’s not?

Let’s start with how to recognize the bad guys...

How do you know if an SEO Company is ‘Black Hat’?

A ‘black hat’ SEO tries to out-smart Google by various unethical and ‘illegal’ tricks, they will:

1. ✓Send you email ‘spam’ out of the blue. Actually I never trust anyone that sends me spam - of any kind. Spam is evil, and spam must die.
   

1. ✓Won’t explain what they do - usually because they’re using illegal techniques that could get you blacklisted from Google results pages altogether. And being blacklisted is bad - your site won’t show up even for your business name or URL address.
   

1. ✓Will promise to register you on 1,000’s of search engines - so what? Google has 90% market share, so why bother?
   

1. ✓Will promise you ‘thousands’ of links to your site, often on poor quality sites known as ‘link farms’. These are the sites that you stumble upon that are just full of links and nothing else, these sites are known as ‘spamdexing’ or, in other words, spamming a search engine. Google is savvy to these sites and if you have a link on one of them, your ranking will actually suffer.
   

1. ✓Guarantee you a number #1 organic ranking on Google, by either claiming to have ‘cracked the Google code’ or that they have some kind of ‘special relationship’ with Google. No one can truly promise you a #1 ranking because the Google algorithm is top secret. Apparently the latest rumor is that several people work on only a piece of the actual algorithm, and the separate pieces come together to create the Googlebot code that then crawls across the web indexing sites. Click here if you want know more about how Googlebot works.
   

Okay, so what about ‘white hat’ SEO?

A ‘white hat’ SEO plays by the rules. And they should be able to...

1. ✓Show you examples of their previous work & success stories: They should have some real-world examples to show you wherein they have improved a site’s Google ranking, and also show that this has had a positive runoff in terms of real-world sales conversions. That is, their efforts have directly improved the client’s bottom line.
   

1. ✓Show you real client testimonials... from real people, not made up ones!
   

1. ✓Display honesty and transparency - explain exactly what they do, and how it affects site rankings.
   

1. ✓Have their own site ranking well for top keywords - the proof is in the pudding. Their own site should exemplify their efforts and SEO skills.
   

1. ✓Keep up to date with the latest developments in SEO, e.g. how Twitter might improve your SEO efforts.
   

1. ✓Play by the rules and follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines: If they play fair everyone wins out in the end. Read the Google Webmaster Guidelines here.
   

Next article: Social Media - why it’s still the Next Big Thing..

Got questions about SEO-driven web copywriting? See my site at: www.MeriWords.com.au, or email me: meri@meriwords.com.au.

                               

© Meri Harli 2010