Guaranteed top ten positions - employing a black hat SEO

We tend to find a lot of our clients on the back of recommendations both directly from our clients and indirectly from SEO agencies who understand that what we do compliments what they do, but occasionally our clients get offers that seem to be too good to be true… "Get 20 keywords into top ten positions, or pay us nothing!"

As many things that sound too good to be true - no risk, guaranteed placement? - unfortunately there is a small risk. This risk is the fact that these smaller businesses use many well-known black hat techniques that do tend to work, like "mesh linking" and spamming forums, but which if Google finds out you employ will stop indexing your site. This of course means no traffic, and repeat offenders can be banned permanently... So if your business depends on search engine traffic, using one of these agencies is the equivalent of trusting that man in the pub that guarantees you a sure thing on the 10 to 1 horse (and betting your business on it).

DirectNews does give some SEO advice to clients. We have (had to) become specialists in optimising clients' news to make sure it does the job and generate targeted traffic, otherwise we would lose this business. And while we aren't a specialist SEO agency, we do recommend talking to one...

Detected

"Don't worry, Google can't detect this..."

Google doesn't need to - if you suddenly start doing better than expected for a term, your competitors will be curious as to why. And if they spot a black hat technique which stops them ranking better than you, they will happily fill in the Google spam report.

How to select an SEO Company:

SEO is filled with dodgy companies, so
1. Ask about other clients
2. Ask them about their view on black hat techniques (don't expect them to be whiter than white - they should know and understand the techniques, but most good companies do not recommend anything can get you a ban).
3. Ask them what a 301 is and what it is used for…

Google provide a list on what to look for in an SEO company - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35291

Additional advice that I personally would give

I have worked in SEO before and I strongly believe that a good SEO expert combined with a good site works. However, it does take time and you need to allow the SEO to work with small points on the site, from the HTML through to the content writing. All the small improvements will take time to see any benefits from, so be patient. Also, it won't just be about keyword rankings but about generating good quality traffic from the search engines. (It's no good ranking for a phrase such as 'car insurance' if you don't rank for anything else.)

Most reputable SEO agencies will take time to see results. SEO can be a relatively slow process - most of the advice won't give you any huge leap (changing code on site, a few links here and there) but the sum of this advice and the impact on your overall search traffic should be immense...

SEO isn't a silver bullet - you still need a good site.