Watch out with that. I've found that many many SEO experts are scammers. The question you have to ask is: if they are so good at it, why do they need you to hire them?

With that said I've found Sparrow over here at the forum to be a trustworthy guy and you should probably speak with him as well as others here who are well know to be trustworthy.

If they make you gauratees about rankings. That's probably a bad sign. There ARE no guarantees when it comes to Google.

I agree with Mike.

It might be a better idea for you to design a plan for how you want to improve your rankings and then outsource each piece of your plan.

For example, build a Squidoo page, build a HubPage, write 10 articles, etc. Then outsource all of it to one person or pieces of it to different people.

Chai

Story time
I paid a SEO company $2500 to "put my sites on page one of Google". We selected keywords that I wanted and I gave them 2 of my sites to work with.
One site went to page one for 1/3 of our keywords ( the easy ones) The other site was BANNED from the Google index!

It took me 3 weeks of begging to get my site re-indexed with Google again. The only saving grace was I was not alone. This "firm" got hundreds of sites banned and we were all in the same boat.

I learned my lesson - If they could learn about SEO I could learn about it and thats exactly what I did.
SEO done properly is started from the minute you THINK about putting a website together.

Learn what you need to do to get your website at the top and then hire someone to do some of the tasks - Don't hire an SEO firm to take over the entire project.

Your SEO tasks involve everything you do with your website. From its basic structure to the articles you post every day - learn it.

My suggestion - learn about it yourself. Hire a coach to work with you. It will be money well spent.

The other thing you need to know about SEO - it takes time. Nothing happens overnight. Its like an investment and pays off as your site develops and matures.

Hope that helps

Hey Donna! As per all the members input - yes - there are a lot of SEO scammers out there- even ones that are very convincing on the phone or their sales pages..that tried to scoop a client from me and what do you know, they tried them out and wasted over $1,000 in 30 days and lost some of their page 1 rankings!

Watch the WF for the strong SEO folks, buy up the WSO's on SEO info to get educated (so even if you do outsource, you can better check for fakes) and if outsourcing is the way to go - look for a warrior that has great feedback or a resource that has a good reputation.

Google even their email id - the one they use for paypal payments...I've done that before buying a PR5 site from and that gmail id popped up on the dn forum as 'watch out for this scammer with a bunch of aka's)

This forum is great for educating yourself -

If outsourcing is a way to go - if he is accepting any clients check out seanim warrior id - Sean Mitchell - he is the bomb for seo and others - (consults to the gurus) and has been featured in the press etc. so he is for real!

If your keywords aren't that hard, it shouldn't be difficult to get you dominating google page 1 - using an SEO optimized wordpress blog, submitting your RSS feed to feed aggregators, creating videos and submitting to the video sharing sites, press release on webwire, create if you don't have one, an ebay userid and create a ebay blog with keywords in the title and keyword optimized in the ebay blog text, and some web 2.0 stuff backlinking to the WP blog - squidoo, hubpages, videos, myspace.

Good luck! Cheers, Mia

I think SEO is definitely something any webmaster should learn something about. It doesn't take much to learn the basics, so even if you don't fancy doing it yourself, at least you will be able to spot a scammer. I would recommend David Viney's book - "Getting to the Top on Google".

As said above, outsource this in separate chunks.

Franck.

I absolutely agree!

Learning about SEO is something you want to do as Debbie mentioned.

I also believe in outsourcing...again you have to work with companies who know what they're doing and have a great reputation that you build a long term relationship with.

There are core things you must do on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to build your SEO strategy. If you have a system for your SEO system then you can direct the operation of the people you hire as contractors.

Bryan Dulaney

If you plan to outsource it, make sure the company will specify what are they going to do.

If starts to talk about link farming, link buying, etc. Run Away!

Hi Donna,

I think there are three issues when it comes to "seo".

The first is that everyone seems to want to get ranked naturally as quickly as possible and there really isn't anything out there that will make that happen. You're at the mercy of the search engines and your competition.

The second is that there are scammers out there that have given everyone a bad name when it comes to Internet marketing. This is unfortunate.

Lastly, everyone has a different definition of SEO. If you think of the word "marketing" as being a process, then Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is comprised of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Advertising (SEA) and Link Building (LB).

The later is your outreach program taking content (articles, news, videos, photos) and distributing them through the Internet. This process not only generates traffic from more than just search engines, but also increases the critical mass of links about your website - thus and ultimately raises your rankings with the search engines.

So my question to you is what part of the SEM process are you looking for help with? The SEO part, which we describe as being only what is done on your website is for the most part a one time process and fee. The Link Builiding or Outreach Program is the one that gets costs in terms of content development, content distribution and then content management/measurement/analysis.

We are a full service digital marketing agency and could help you if you're interested. Contact information is below.

I don't think SEO is some advanced science as it seems to be a combination of article marketing, blog posts, and adding key words on your site. I just need to find the time to do this for all my sites!

--Adam (AKA "The Traffic Guru")

Hi Donna -
Much of the advice you've been given is right on. If you don't know much about SEO yourself then you leave yourself open to being scammed. I even had an SEO company (and I use the term "seo company" with a grain of salt) call me and tell me that they could guarantee me a listing on the first page of Google within 24 hours.

Being the "curious" person I am, and pretending to be nieve about the whole process, I asked how they could do that.

This company then went on to explain that by purchasing AdWords advertisements on Google I could be on the first page of Google within a day.

While this is technically true, it's a total scam. The whole purpose of SEO is to get you listed in the top organic listings without having to pay for it - but I'm not telling you guys anything you don't already know.

SEO is a process and a process that takes awhile depending upon your market. In 2009 I'm actually coming out with an entire SEO course just for people like you that gives you the tasks you need to complete on a daily basis, in order to help your site rank well. And it's all on the up-and-up. I'll be doing a WSO for it as well hopefully by the end of this month.

I know that doesn't help you much right now but if I were in your position, before you outsourced, I'd ask a few questions of any SEO company you were looking to work with:

• How long have you been in business doing SEO or Online Marketing?
• How important do you think PageRank is? (If they say it's the most important thing to getting good rankings, move on to a new company).
• How do you go about optimizing my website? They should answer this with responses such as on-page optimization, using sitemaps, using robots.txt files, getting backlinks (slowly by the way), keyword research, etc.
• Can you guarantee that I will be listed on the first page of Google? (if they say yes, move on to another company).
• What is your SEO process? They should be able to answer this in a systematic way - such as "first we do this, and then this, and then this, etc."
• Have any of the sites you've worked on in the past ever been banned?
• If so, why?
• Do you think the meta keywords tag is important? If they respond that this is a big part of the overall seo process, then move on to another company. Meta keywords are pretty much useless.
• Do you still have to pay the full price if you don't see any improvements or results? This can be a touchy subject. Topics and keywords range from highly competitive to relatively low competition. Obviously it will take far longer to rank well for a competitive term than a low competition term and this should be laid out in the contract. The company should be given a reasonable amount of time to rank your web pages well given the keywords they're working with. Highly competitive terms can oftentimes take up to a year to rank well for while I've actually ranked sites overnight for low-competition terms.

These are just a few questions to consider. Educate yourself first.

- Kristine

Well, people above have adviced you correctly.

Many of so-called SEO experts are nothing but scammers. One may get caught easily with them!

I'd advice to take the harder path, learn as you ride. Will be better for now, as well for future websites.

[DELETED]