Research is such an important part in choosing an SEO company. It is imperitive for the long term success of your business that you make the right selection the first time.I know it all sounds so exciting when you’ve been amped up by this cheerful, energetic sales person who assures you, “only success” it’s so easy to jump the gun and say “Yes, Yes, Yes!”, but you need to STEP BACK and really take a look at what you’re getting into.

Google Says: Choose Wisely

While you consider whether to go with an SEO, you may want to do some research on the industry. Google is one way to do that, of course. You might also seek out a few of the cautionary tales that have appeared in the press, including this article on one particularly aggressive SEO:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002002970_nwbizbriefs12.html.

While Google doesn’t comment on specific companies, we’ve encountered firms calling themselves SEOs who follow practices that are clearly beyond the pale of accepted business behavior. Be careful.

What We Say: The article mentioned above is one example of why it is important to choose your SEO Company wisely. Imagine 12 months going by, approximately 1k a month and no rankings! This means at the end of the deal your 12k short and 12 months behind the competition. I can’t emphasize enough on the importance to do your research and choose your SEO Company cautiously.

Google Says: You should never have to link to an SEO

Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of “free-for-all” links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines. These are typically useless exercises that don’t affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines — at least, not in a way you would likely consider to be positive.

What We Say: YOU SHOULD NEVER HAVE TO LINK TO AN SEO
The only reason an SEO company would urge you to link to them is they either don’t know what they’re doing or they’re trying to increase their own rankings.

Google Says: Be sure to understand where the money goes.

While Google never sells better ranking in our search results, several other search engines combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results. Some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results. A few SEOs will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that they “control” other search engines and can place themselves in the slot of their choice. This scam doesn’t work with Google because our advertising is clearly labeled and separated from our search results, but be sure to ask any SEO you’re considering which fees go toward permanent inclusion and which apply toward temporary advertising.

What We Say: We discussed this in Part One. It is important to know what’s done in the optimisation process to know where the money is going to. Your SEO Company should not be vague in explaining the process nor secretive. An overall explanation of where the money is going and the processes involved should be easily explained.

What Google Says: What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter?
One common scam is the creation of “shadow” domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client’s behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor’s domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.

Another illicit practice is to place “doorway” pages loaded with keywords on the client’s site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO’s other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.

What We Say: Other black hat techniques include things like setting up a links page on their site which links within existing clients, working with doorway pages, keyword stuffing, asking you to link to locations that you don’t know or not asking at all (linking to other authority sites is ok, for example if you are a car rental place linking to Wotif, so a non competitive industry that is an authority).

What Google Says: What are some other things to look out for?
There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It’s far from a comprehensive list, so if you have any doubts, you should trust your instincts. By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:

- owns shadow domains
- puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
- offers to sell keywords in the address bar
- doesn’t distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear on search results pages
- guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
- operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
- gets traffic from “fake” search engines, spyware, or scumware
- has had domains removed from Google’s index or is not itself listed in Google
- requests your FTP account information or root access to your server

What We Say: I would exclude FTP account requests – we need these in order to make correct on page modifications, however, if our clients don’t feel secure with sending those details we always offer the option of sending them the files with the modifications so they can insert these themselves. Don’t freely give out your log in information, make sure you ask questions and know what’s going where and WHY. I’m going to reiterate the importance of research when choosing an SEO company because as Google Says “Choose Wisely” to avoid any of the common mishaps, scams and utter fraudulent processes that SEO companies may throw at you if you’re not careful.

Good Luck