When it comes to business, some people like to get their hands dirty and iron out every little detail of every little deal and transaction. Others like to handle the parts of the business that they know and are comfortable with, leaving the bits and pieces they are unsure about to people who know what they are doing.

Before you start looking for a search engine optimisation company, sit down and consider your situation. What goals do you have for your website? What are your priorities? How much can you afford to spend? Remember that you pay for quality; the lowest price isn’t always the best deal.

When it is time to submit your web-based business to a search engine their are search engine optimisation companies who, for a fee, will be happy to optimise the websites for the business owners who do not feel comfortable doing it themselves.

Search engine optimisation is the art and science of making a website attractive to search engines. If you don’t know where to find a reputable search engine optimisation company, try looking in search engine optimisation forums, references or articles on reputable websites, ask friends for recommendations, ask other webmasters if they used anyone to optimise their sites and if they did, ask which company they used and if the experience was pleasant.

The first thing you have to watch out for when you’re selecting a company to handle your search engine optimisation is scams. The first thing to do is avoid any search engine optimisation companies that are listed in the black hat directory. Black hat search engine optimisation is not really optimising but really just spamdexing; most search engines penalise websites that are caught spamdexing. Also, avoid any company that guarantees a ranking before they even look at your site. Make sure the company you are considering is actually going to do something besides add doorway pages and meta tags.

What is spamdexing?

Spamdexing is using methods that manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine, usually in a manner that is inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system. A lot of times, spamdexing is done by stuffing a website full of keywords. Web crawlers (the programs search engines use to rank websites) read the websites, they read lots of the same keywords and assume that the site is content rich. Based on the web crawler’s findings, the website is given a high rank. A lot of the time, the keywords are stuck at the bottom of the document where the internet user can’t see them. Keyword stuffing is considered content spam.

The other common type of spamdexing is link spam. Link spam is spamdexing that takes advantage of link ranking algorithms, causing search engines to give the guilty website a higher ranking. Link farms, hidden links, Sybil attack, wiki spam, spam blogs (also referred to as splogs), page hijacking, buying expired domains, and referrer log spamming are forms of link spam.