the online world is a bit of a wild west at the moment as its very difficult to police, there are loads of cowboy outfits claiming the sun and the moon both to consumers and to industry peeps and it can be difficult to tell the difference, especially if you have little or no understanding of the online world and how it works, and when it comes to and education in online marketing its really chicken and egg as you need to know about online marketing to know what to learn and whats right and whats not, total irony. Whlist in affiliate marketing or PPC there isnt as much scamming, I find that SEO is the area where scammy companies love.

The reason behind this is simply that there are two kind of SEO - Black hat and white hat, there is also no way of guaranteeing results its all very finger in the air making it great to take peoples money and run. This is compounded by that fact that aside from a handful of Googles elite no one really knows how Google works.

The simplest way of finding a good SEO company? If they aren’t listed in the first three places on for generic SEO searches, like ‘SEO’, ‘Search Engine Optimization’, or ‘Search Engine Marketing’ then avoid them, if they can’t rank for what they do then there’s something fishy. All this being said, SEO is expensive business, its time and labor intensive, and it can be tempting to go for a cheaper company. The challenge here is the process ‘dodgy’ SEO companies go through to get a site ranking, this in it self can, in the long term, be very detrimental to the brand and in extreme cases can get a site banned from Google.

The alternative to outsourcing SEO to a company is to do it yourself,a nd for most affiliates this is really the only option.

SEO is broken into Onpage and Offpage SEO- there are two schools of thought with regards to SEO- white hat and black hat (white hat SEO is good, Black hat is dodgy).

When it comes to Onpage SEO, you’re basically looking at relevancy to search terms.

When it comes to offpage SEO you’re looking the relationship your site has to other sites and the relationship those other sites have with Google (i.e their Onpage and offpage SEO).

If you consider that Google is essentially looking for high quality and relevant sites that answer the search queries users enter, all you are really trying to achieve is to make your site, the most significant authority on the subject being queried. Hence why .edu (educational sites) and .gov (government sites) sites have very significant weighting in Google.

Building high quality links is a key part of SEO (offpage), there are several ways to approach this:

submit to directory sites and article submission sites. do link exchanges with relevant sites, create link bait, add videos from you tube, create a prescience on wikipedia, answer questions on yahoo answers and other social network sites, and most of all write high qaulity unique articles that people will want to link to.

The long and short of this is regardless if you outsource of do your own SEO, you want to ensure, you are providing high quality content your users will enjoy, and link to equally high quality sites and directories, all the time considering how this reflects on your site and brand and how it wall appeal to Google.