I do not acclaim to be a SEO Guru but I am working for few clients who need SEO consultation. This brings me in contact with many companies who provide SEO and other online promotion stuff. There are a lot of website owners I know who are still wondering how to go about their online marketing.

They are not aware of what tools should be used for online promotions, how effective they can be to attract target audience. Everything for them boils down to SEO and SEM. These are overwhelming terms and the way they are presented, it’s easy to get exited and at the same time confused.

Here are telltale signs that are good enough to hint to jump away from those companies and better look out for someone who have better understanding of SEO:

1. Self-acclaimed Expertise with due display of expertise: Those who are good most of times will be able to show their involvement with active community of SEO world instead of quoting "proprietary" insights and strategies. They would often display testimonials from the experts who you would have never heard, or recommendations from website owners who would be rarely searchable on internet.

2. Inflating Keyword Densities: Few days back, at a coffee lounge I just over heard a company discussing about their client’s online SEO strategy. They were discussing about infusing the content of the website with keywords to get the website, rank good for those keywords. According to it content should be written in a way that desired keywords are equally distributed all over the page uniformly.

Unfortunately Search Engines are much ahead. Beware anything over 5% of keyword density can make Google be more skeptical about your web pages. Onpage optimization is important, but keyword stuffing is good indication to smell something wrong. A professional SEO firm wont even discuss such a thing.

3. Search engine and Directory Submissions: Many SEO firms suggest that they will submit your website to 100's and 1000's of directories and search engines. The matter of fact is that even if they do, these hundred thousand directories and search engines wont even give you a single visitor. Though there are some very cool industry specific directories and search engines who get best of information from particular industry. But they should be well researched. Save money and save time by staying away from organizations with such suggestions.

4. Link Buying: Link buying for me is an advertising strategy than a SEO. A natural link can never be replaced by purchased one and is easily identified by present search engines. It is expensive and not a sign of good SEO firm, as anyone with very little knowledge and efforts can buy links or rarely good links. The benefit is temporary and you need to keep renewing the contract (Read- Spending Money) to keep them in place. A good SEO firm should be able to cultivate good quality links that you don’t need to buy.

5. Amateur Social Media Strategy: Many SEO firms state in their packages that they will submit your website to many Social Media websites like Digg, Netvibes, Delicious, or StumbleUpon. But as these sites have millions of active users, an equally huge amount of content is updated on these websites, so just submission or bit of push does not work if they are not having an expert to monitor and optimize your website for such Social Media websites. Jump away if you can find any amateur claims like getting votes or favours for your website. Any mistake can easily get your website being continuously banned by such Social Media Websites. Otherwise these social media sites can be of great tool for effective SEO for your website and a great tool to get to your target audience.

6. Malicious SEO Practices: Any blackhat techniques like putting hidden text, different landing pages for search engines, redirects and different content for users. Stay away, as sooner than later your website will be banned for such activities.

7. Complicated Strategies: For all the strategies, that have no logical reasoning to suffice your doubts, except proprietary strategy, it would be better to not involve yourself. Though SEO is tricky, its no rocket science and every strategy needs to be backed by logical reasoning, which should be in lines of best practices personalized effectively for your website.

For any SEO firm that tries to outsmart Search Engines, you know the answer.
So if you are looking for an SEO firm, do read SEO journals and blogs to know whats in and whats correct.

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