How to avoid SEO scammers and who to choose?

This is an area that i personally know very well and have been conned out of hard earned money on a few occasions in the past.

The rule of thumb i tend to go for now is NEVER go with a company who cold calls you. By this i mean someone who phones you up and gives you the hard sell and tells you exactly what is wrong with your site and offers a very simple, yet never cheap solution for achieving search engine success.

Is is true that if you don't really know what you are doing when it comes to search engines, it is far better to outsource to an SEO/Marketing company. But it should be on your terms and with whoever you choose. The way i would and do choose an SEO company is to look through their testimonials and then type in the keywords that they have said they have optimised for another website and see how they rank. Try to choose a keyword here that has a similar number of results to the keyword you would like optimised. An example from our website would be Waste Bins, this has 706,000 results according to Google, which is actually considered not a very competitive keyword. But you need to be aware that this is a very relevant, specific keyword and the competition is quite strong for first page ranking.

One of the fad things SEO companies are doing at the moment to increase back links and traffic is to ask you for a brief article containing your keywords about a relevant topic and they then submit it to however many back links you have paid for. Whilst i am not disputing that this doesn't work, or that they aren't going to fulfil however many back links they have said they would, its long term benefit is completely unknown. The websites that your article is placed on, contain hundreds, if not thousands of other articles. Whilst this in Googles eyes at the moment is not called a link farm, it is a more recent version of it. It just applies basic logic by writing a relevant article that have your keywords in, so it looks like a vote for your site in Googles eyes. In the long run i do think Google will clamp down on this because it is just a recent version of a link farm with a lot of duplicate content spread over hundreds of sites in a minimal amount of time. Yes its short term results seem fairly good, is it worth the possible long term consequences? That is your decision!