How To Rate An SEO Service
I got an email the other day from a company in India that wanted my SEO business. I don’t think that they read my site, but they talked to me about link building and I don’t write about that much so maybe they did. They contacted me through my email form so what they sent wasn’t officially Spam, but it sure read like a form letter and if I got it through the regular email I would have considered it junk.
Their claim to “AMAZE you with our work” and mentioning several times their “ETHICAL LINK building process” and “white hat technique” got me curious so I wrote to them and asked them exactly how they planned to do that.
They told me that they wanted 50% up front and before the other half was to be paid they would send me a “report of the confirmed links”. They sent me a lot of other information about how their “One Way Links will help to achieve Top 10 ranks in Google, Yahoo & MSN” and sent a price list, but still no mention of how they got the links that they claim would be so beneficial to my site. While I don’t argue that getting relevant inbound links to my site will help in my rankings, being labeled as a spammer may get me in trouble (like with so much of the crap that I fight against being posted here in this blog).
So I Googled this company. I tried several keyword terms that they claimed to help me with like “Search Engine Optimization”, “SEO services”, “link building packages” and more and couldn’t find them anywhere (surprise, surprise). The keyword terms were all pretty competitive ones so I tried to find them for their name (not mentioned here) and I went back 25 pages. Still nothing!
I am thinking that if you can’t be found for your own name and your site is more than a couple of days old you must have done something bad not to be on the search engine results.
To read more about shopping for SEO services there’s a good post on the Wordpreneur site
Read What’s so Tricky About Shopping for an SEO Service?
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Thanks for sharing your experience. I got a similar experience some time back when some indians called me for some article writing project. No idea where they got my number for the record.
Coming back to SEO, it’s best to contact companies with proven records. Can always google their listings. Can’t beat that.
Comment by Increase Web Site Traffic — March 18, 2008 @ 11:23 pm