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 an owner knows SEO, he/she is not 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. Every SEO specialist will boast about adopting latest path breaking SEO techniques, testimonials from clients and gurantees of #1 placement on Google. But how you as a non expert select a genuine SEO consultant? Listed below, are few pointers on how to detect a fake SEO consultant.



1. #1 Google ranking for Website: If any company guarantees you that they can place your website on number one position on Google for your keywords then take my advice - RUN in the opposite direction. Its obvious this company is desperate to get business and is willing misleads 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 lot of hard work. At most a company can claim that they can acquire good ranking like top 10 on Google. But even then, verify their past track record to guess on how the fared with other clients.

2. Very Low Prices: Many companies charge ridiculously low amount of money for quite a lot of service. 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 like programmers, content writers, SEO analyst, link builders etc. pool their resources to make a site successful on Google and obviously SEO services cannot come as cheap as many companies charge.

3. Secret and Proprietary Technique That Cannot be Revealed: I don't think we should even 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.

4. 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 these practices have very short term benefits but they can be very counter productive because search engines eventually catch website following these shady practices. Many websites big and small have been heavily penalized for using these techniques. So play safe and avoid these SEO companies like plague.

5. 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.

If you keep these tips in mind while choosing a SEO company for your website then it's very much possible that you will finally select a SEO company that knows their job and can handle your website promotion very well.

Author: Aniruddha Badola