May 5th, 2010 by Susie

Professional search engine optimisation services often get frustrated when they see SEO companies who obviously know little about what makes up a good internet marketing service snatching up customers who should know better.

An eye-grabbing marketing hook doesn’t mean a company is going to do your internet marketing any good, but these days, it’s too easy for low quality “search engine optimization” firms to buy their way onto the front page through Google Adwords. These are usually bristling with “once in a lifetime” offers, that “guarantee” you a top place on the rankings at suspiciously low cost.

No reputable SEO company will ever make promises like this. There are only two ways that search engine optimisation services can guarantee a top place on the Google rankings. This is by black hat (i.e. spamming) methods, which cheat a site up the rankings, or via the same pay-per-click marketing methods they themselves are using.

Neither of these will work for long. Google gets very wise, very quickly, to sites that spam their way up the rankings. They not only get penalised, they can get permanently banned. This is exactly the opposite of what an online reputation management company is about. As for Adwords, this is fine for short-term use (many reputable SEO services actually advise this technique, for sites that are newly launched and therefore faring poorly in the rankings) or for long term use on particular keywords that a good SEO firm will advise you upon, however, unless you’re prepared to pay a lot of money, most sites will gain more traffic cheaper from SEO.

The truth is, a lot of these so-called search engine optimization companies are based in foreign lands where it’s almost impossible to get your money back. They offer false promises they have no intention of delivering on. They are five minute wonders with short-term domains, who quite often earn a living via “special offer” 5-day trials in which they charge an absurdly low sum to spam customers’ bank account details.

As the customers have willingly given these details out online, they have little or no hope of getting their money back from the bank when they see mysteriously large amounts disappearing from their accounts. The service which, once they looked at it more closely, they had no intention of extending beyond its 5-day trial has somehow become a regular commitment that doesn’t even allow the option of direct debit cancellation. It’s a practice that’s rife on the internet – unfortunately, people still manage to fall for it.

So, how do you know when you’ve found a search engine optimization company that’s reputable? A sure-fire way to tell the good from the bad is to see if those who advertise their way up the rankings do equally well if you Google the word “scam” after the company name.

Another good pointer is if the SEO company has contact address details in the UK. It’s not fool-proof, as scam companies can buy UK addresses from abroad – but it helps.

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