There’s no magic bullet to help you build your online business. There I said it. It’s out there on the Internet now and there’s nothing I can do to take it back. You’d be amazed how many people I meet or talk to who believe they’ve found The One.

There are a lot of ways to tell if a Search Engine Optimization firm is legit, but here are five guaranteed signs that the company (or person) you’re dealing with is scamming you:

Guaranteed Search Results

There are exactly three companies in the world who can guarantee you top quality SERP (Search Engine Result Page) results. They are:

1. Google
2. Yahoo
3. Microsoft

Anybody else that tells you they can guaranteed top quality organic search results is trying to separate you from your money and usually at an inflated rate. There is absolutely no way to guarantee making it onto the first page of a major search engine unless you’re dealing with Matt Cutts and I’m pretty sure he’s not taking bribes.

If it looks like a duck …

Quality SEO work is not cheap. My blog here has a PageRank of 5. That’s really good for a personal website. Want to know how I did it? It’s all here on my blog. It’s a lot of hard work, more hard work than most people can imagine. It’s about sifting through hundreds or thousands of pages on your website and tweaking every one of them so if somebody says they can do if for cheap, they’re simply lying.

Organic Results

An organic results is a non paid result. Google listings for example are organic unless you’re paying for an ad placement on the SERP’s. Make sure that the company that you’re hiring isn’t running paid links or postings on unrelated pages to artificially bolster their results. Frankly, scamming people with fake results is too easy so make sure you keep your eye on the Queen. 

Their Own Secret Formula

There is no secret formula. Honestly, there’s no such thing as a secret formula to SEO. Search Engine Optimization is real, but there is no secret to it. In fact, you can do it yourself if you have the time and knowledge. Read this, in fact read any article by Darren Rowse and then if you’re still confused buy his book. Here’s the secret in a nutshell:

1. Write content people want to read
2. Make sure you understand the basic structure of HTML
3. Make sure you understand the two meta tags
4. Repeat

OK fine, there’s a bit more to it than that or his book wouldn’t sell but for free I’ll give you this advice … as soon as your SEO firm tells you they have a secret formula, run.

Paid Links

Do you know what Google hates more than a gopher in the garden? Paid links. I promise you, paying for links will get your website slapped so fast you won’t know see the light of day for a month. How do I know this? Because I listen to the people who work there. 

The way I read it, the people at Google take pride in what they do and their whole corporate mantra “do no evil” actually appears to be true. I used to think Google was just a robot, spidering the Internet looking blindly for content. Then I discovered that Google was a company made up of people, and those people took a lot of pride in what they do, that led me to understand that Google was like any gardener … if you try to steal their carrots, you’ll get a shovel on your furry little head.