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