Not all SEO companies are created equal. Some use legitimate and ethical ways of improving your search engine rankings; some use sketchy and sometimes even illegal ways to get your sites on top; and some over-promise but under-deliver. Read on as we discuss each type, and pick up a tip or two in choosing the right SEO company for you.

The ‘good’ SEO company

A genuinely professional SEO company uses only the ethical methods of improving your site’s ranking, ‘ethical methods’ being techniques deemed acceptable according to search engines guidelines.

An ethical SEO company will typically improve your site’s structure and content in order to get you to the top pages. They usually install mechanisms to allow search engine spiders to access your site while protecting some of your directories, for example. They will also optimize your graphical content (including Flash animation) so that search engines can decipher the information.

They may also use frequently-searched strings of words to name your pages, add relevant meta tags (without off topic words or comments, of course), and design a sitemap so that all your page links are easily ‘spidered.’ A good SEO company will also establish beneficial links to your site by promoting it and getting high-ranking websites to want to link to it. Adding relevant keyword-rich content is also considered an ethical SEO method, so good SEO companies will likely use this, too.

The ‘bad’ SEO company

On the flip side, there are so-called ‘bad’ SEO companies that use SEO techniques deemed unethical. Keyword spamming or stuffing is one such dirty tactic – the SEO company may insert concealed, random text on the page to increase the keyword density. This cunning technique can be done by simply encoding the text in a color that blends with the page’s background, or by placing text ‘at the back’ of an image (through CSS “Z” positioning).

Bad SEO companies likewise trick search engine algorithms by using ‘Spamdexing’ (a combination of spam and indexing) to promote irrelevant pages. ‘Cloaking’ is yet another tactic of bad SEO companies – they find ways to make search engine spiders detect a page that is completely different from what will be seen by human users. Other bad SEO company tactics include mirroring sites, creating doorway pages, and filling pages with irrelevant links.

The ‘ugly’ SEO company

There are literally thousands of phony SEO companies that guarantee you top 10 placements on chief search engines, but most of them never deliver. Some of these fake SEO companies even claim to have special relationships with top engines like Google and Yahoo. Do not be fooled by promises that are too good to be true – remember that improving search engine ranking does not happen overnight. A fool-proof SEO strategy can only be delivered by an honest SEO company with a long-term plan and ethical methods.