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How To Spot A Scam SEO Company

Guest post by: Troy

Article Overview: Subjectively, The art of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), can be defined as a highly-specialized process of creating a successful website, because if a commercial website cannot be found in major search engines, the SEO "expert" is basically just isn't doing it's job. The art of SEO directly addresses the need for a website to corner more traffic and get targeted visitors, who in turn will convert into buying customers.

How To Spot A Scam SEO Company

Subjectively, The art of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), can be defined as a highly-specialized process of creating a successful website, because if a commercial website cannot be found in major search engines, the SEO "expert" is basically just isn't doing it's job. The art of SEO directly addresses the need for a website to corner more traffic and get targeted visitors, who in turn will convert into buying customers.

The need for priority placement and top rankings is a daily, on-going challenge for a professional SEO specialist. The SEO field, as a whole, needs to get updated with constant changing technology, and also needs to be familiar with other web site marketing techniques such as banner ads, pay-per-click programs and even standard offline advertising options.

How To Spot An SEO Scam

Here are a few methods, or terminologies, unscrupulous SEO firms employ to lure their poor clients into accepting their methods as legitimate ones. In the end, these sorry clients may just suddenly wake up and realize that they'd been tricked, and find out that their goals of increased traffic and higher rankings have never been fully addressed, or were never even tackled in the first place.

- Cloaking. This term refers to an unethical technique that is used by some shady SEO firms to serve up one page of highly-optimized text to the search engines and a different page to your visitors. While this is not a scam in the same sense as with other scams, however this would be problematic since, over time, more than likely your site will be caught by the search engines and your IP address and domain name will be banned.

The miserable effect of this is that you will be engaging in unethical activity, you will pay money for this, and your site will suffer by being dropped from the search engines. One way to be aware of this is watching for other files your SEO company may be placing on your site, or you could state upfront with your SEO firm that you do not want cloaking used on your site.

- SEO Email Spam. Whenever you receive e-mail messages like "We've noticed that you are not listed in some search engines", be suspicious. The best way to find an SEO company is to search the major search engines you wish to be listed upon for them and not let them come to you. After all, if an SEO expert can get their sites high in the search engine rankings, chances are they can do the same for you.

- "Guaranteed Rankings". These so-called guarantees, by themselves, are not bad as many credible SEO firms also offer some sort of guarantee on their services. Be on the lookout for the guarantees that offer quite incredible results, such as "rank number 1 in Google in 2 weeks", or guarantees that are so watered-down that they sound meaningless. Expecting quick of results for new, uneducated customers may be quite unrealistic in the SEO world, so customers need to be educated as to what they should realistically expect.

There are fly-by-night SEO firms who will play off of these "drive-up window" expectations and promise unrealistic time frames for results, and afterward, they will balk at giving refunds, or offer you other services for more money in place of refunds. In the end, these so-called SEO experts may become unreachable by mail, email or phone, and suddenly disappear from the market.

Distinguishing the legitimate SEO firms from the phony ones can be a challenging, and daunting activity. However, with a little investigative work, you would be able to spot them, and avoid most pitfalls.


Vanessa Arellano Doctor
7SEO- SEO Company

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Article Tags: Internet, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEM, SEO



Related Forum Posts
Re: Quote of the Day - "We are each responsible for our own life - In one of my articles related to "Is It a Scam or is it YOU" most cry Scam when in fact they have done nothing the with the program, havent followed the bluprint or the training, improperly marketed it. etc. "One mans scam may be another mans bonanza" is a quote used. Summing up the article, Do your Own Due Diligence, Make your own decision, and finally "Take Responsibility for your Decision regardless of the outcome Good or Bad"
How to valuate a business - Hi Garth - here is how we did it at Northern Crown Capital when I was helping them raise venture capital for Toronto-based entrepreneurs. Assume the start date is 2003 so 2008 projections are 5 years out: How Northern Crown Capital Valuates a Business 2008 Financial Projections Earnings Before Tax $5,865,000 Tax Rate 42% Taxes $2,463,300 Net Earnings $3,401,700 Amount Seeking to Raise Today $3,500,000 Discounted Value of Future Opportunity, 5 Years Out 2008 P/E Ratio 15 Value of Company in 2008 $51,025,500 Discount Rate Applied 30% Year 2008 $51,025,500 Year 2007 $35,717,850 Year 2006 $25,002,495 Year 2005 $17,501,747 Year 2004 $12,251,223 Value of Company at Investment in 2003 $12,251,223 Less: Investment Amount $3,500,000 Present Value $8,751,223 Discount for Risk & Private Company 40% Less: Discount for Risk & Private Company $3,500,489 Private Company Value $5,250,734 Present Value (What the Owner Keeps) $5,250,734 60.00% Financing (What the Investor Gets) $3,500,000 40.00% Total $8,750,734 100.00% I hope this helps!
Re: Profiles on Infamous Entrepreneurs? - Hi Kevin, I guess the point about running a "Scam" thread would be to attract those different opinions so they can be aired on an open forum and responded to fairly. Both sides of the argument could then be seen in one place (here!).
Ranked #1 in just over 7 weeks - Hi all. i wanted to post this here just because I'm really happy with the results I've seen. Last week I was looking at my analytics and noticed I had a hit from a search engine using the term "mlm blogs". I researched it, and between "mlm blogs" and mlm blog" there are over 70,000 searches a month. On the down side, when you search for it, you get 22,900,000 results (not suing quotes). I started digging and found myself on page 5 in the 3rd spot. Spot #43 of almost 23 million wasn't too bad, so I decided to try and push it up some. After doing so, I noticed this morning (5 days later) that I managed to make it up to page one, in the 10th spot. There are a couple of very specific sites holding the top couple of spots, so getting #1 may not be easy, but I hope to see #3 or 4 soon. Thanks to all who take the time to read my little post.
Hi everyone - Hi everyone.I am Alex,SEO Analyst on XSEO Company.Nice forum.


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