Over the last decade, SEO has been getting a bad name. From cowboys who charge huge prices for ranking useless keywords to black hat SEOs that risk your website getting banned - SEO services have really gone downhill. Of course there are still legitimate services that will get organic traffic flooding into your website, but finding them is never easy. This article will teach you how to find a cowboy and how to find a black hat.
Cowboys
Interesting creatures, they prey on a customer's ignorance by guaranteeing number one rankings for keywords that don't get searched for. Spotting them isn't easy and their sales spiel may have you begging to hand over that investment. Identifying a cowboy doesn't take the savviest of people - when a SEO service has told you the keywords they are targeting, go to the Google Adwords Tool (Google that) and type in the key phrase. Then check the box marked 'Exact'. This will then display the monthly search volumes for that keyword. If the keyword gets little to no traffic, you can be sure it will be simple to rank number one. Of course you won't get any traffic for that keyword and your money will be wasted.
Black Hats
Unlike cowboys, black hat SEOs are usually very savvy and understand SEO on many levels. However that does not mean to say that you should let them be in charge of your campaign. Black hat SEO is the application of techniques that violate Google's guidelines. This can be from hiding links (making them the same colour as the background) to moving content off the page so that it can be seen by Search Bots but not by users. This type of behaviour on-site can lead to your getting banned from Google!
Learn more about Black Hats on Wikipedia's page