[TIPS] How to Detect 'Fake' SEO Consultants

by Aniruddha Badolla

As a small or medium business owner, you may want to advertise and promote your website as economically as possible. In recent years, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has emerged as one of the surest and cheapest way for long-term business promotion.


A typical business owner is not expected to be knowledgeable about SEO and its benefits. Even if the owner knows SEO, he/she may not be sure how to choose an ethical SEO who can get the job done at the best rates and within timeline. Choosing a SEO consultant or company for your website can be a tiring and overwhelming experience. Many SEO specialists will boast about adopting the latest path-breaking SEO techniques, use testimonials from clients and guarantees of #1 placements on Google. But how can you, as a non expert, select a genuine SEO consultant? Listed below, are a few of the main pointers used to detect 'fake' SEO consultants.
#1 Google ranking for Website:

If any company guarantees you that they can place your website in the number one position on Google, then take my advice - RUN in the opposite direction. It's obvious this company is desperate to get business and is willing misleading you to get your hard earned cash. No company can make such claims. Google's algorithms are one of the best kept secrets. What SEO companies can do is optimize and promote the website according to widely known principles, intelligent guess work, best practices and lots of hard work. At most a company can claim that they can acquire good rankings such as top 10 results. But even then, verify their past track record to measure how they fared with other clients.

Very Low Prices:

Many companies charge ridiculously low amount of money for a lot of services. As an astute business person, you can intelligently deduce that any work that requires hours and hours of hard work, research and analysis by a team of experts cannot come cheap. Most of the times, specialists from various fields such as programmers, content writers, SEO analyst, link builders etc. pool their resources to make a site successful on Google. Therefore quality services cannot come as cheap as many companies charge.

Secret and Proprietary Technique That Cannot be Revealed:

I don't think we even need to elaborate on this. As the owner of the website, you should be aware of what's happening to your site and what steps are been taken to optimize and promote it.

Recommending Black Hat Techniques:

Lot of companies recommends shady tactics known as black hat practices to get your site up in search engines. Not only do these practices have very short term benefits, but they can also be very counter productive since the search engines can eventually catch website following these practices. Many websites big and small have been heavily penalized for using such techniques. So play safe and avoid these SEO companies like the plague.

Using Outdated Techniques:

Once upon a time, techniques like reciprocal link exchange, keyword stuffing etc. were used to get good rankings. Google and other search engines have wisened up and rank a site for its worthiness and not just back links and keyword stuffing. Choose a company that will recommends steps to make your site useful & relevant and not take short cuts.

Keep these tips in mind while choosing an SEO company for your website and hopefully they will help you select an SEO company that knows their job and can handle your website promotion very well. Good luck!

Source: site-reference.com