How many times have you see ads like the above one? How many times did you encounter sales threads like that on webmaster forums? Have you ever considered outsourcing link building to companies/freelancers claiming to deliver thousands of backlinks to your money site? Think twice before doing this!

Search engines’ algorithms have evolved massively over the years and you should probably know by now that any unnatural link building campaign can do more harm to your website than raising its rankings. But how can this type of links harm your rankings?

First of all, link spikes play a major role in determining whether a company has engaged into using “black hat” methods to trick the search engines. It is unlikely that a website can receive hundreds of backlinks in a day or so, all anchored with a certain keyword and most of all coming from the same platforms (forums, blogs etc). When talking about massive linking we refer of course to:

Blogs – blog comments with Scrapebox/Xrumer

Forums – forum profiles with Xrumer/SenukeX/SickSubmitter

Social bookmarks – made with tools such as Bookmarking Demon and so on

The interesting thing is that these links have their place in a link building strategy, however not when it comes to linking to money sites. You can use these with great results on “buffer sites”, such as: social networking websites, guest posts, reviews and so on for getting more link juice to those, link juice that it is transferred to your money site, washed.

These days quality comes over quantity so before getting thousands of backlinks to your website, think twice and have a chat with an experienced SEO company that could tailor a safe strategy based on your requirements/website.

Yet another interesting study launched by HitWise related to search engines and social networks market share. Google has increased the search share in UK with about 1.50% when compared to May 2011, thus reaching a whopping 92% of all UK searches.

Maybe the most interesting part of this latest study is that with all the Google growth within search, the sources of traffic for most websites has declined, in terms of “sources from search engines” from around 40% to 34.29% in June 2011. Computers & Internet category holds the first position among all search categories, followed by Search Engines and Social Networking and Forums.

Although this could be seen as a decline in the search market, in fact it is not – this is a big sign that social media is getting higher and higher when it comes to sending traffic to a website. And indeed, according to HitWise, Facebook’s decline seems to have stopped in June – growing with a 0.11% last month and holding the first position in social networking visits from UK with 53.72% while YouTube is continuously growing its market share, reaching 20.76% in June – a 0.24% increase.

Social networking websites are far away from reaching search engines’ popularity however their constant growth is a sign that anyone serious about expanding an online business should keep a closer eye on everything that means social websites. Whether if we are talking about YouTube, Facebook or Twitter, these are soon to become some really big competitors for Google and also they can be a great source for traffic and sales.

Although many people are aware of the benefits a great SEO company can bring to an online business, the whole search engine optimisation industry is just at it the beginning and more importantly, it is rapidly growing. There are many business owners searching for the right company that can drive their rankings on top of search engines but also there are many others that have tried different SEO vendors with bad results, from not getting the ranks they were running for to even worse – getting their websites de-indexed/banned from search engine results.

How to avoid bad SEO firms is a question anyone should ask so here are some tips below regarding how to sort the wheat from the chaff:

1.      Check on their previous clients

Most SEO agencies have a page where they list their previous clients. Analyse some of them, see what keywords they are targeting and do a rank checking. Are they ranking high? Moreover, do a little spying on how they did reach their rankings and see whether the SEOs have used black hat methods or not.

2.      Check the actual SEO company’s rankings

If they are really as good as they sound, see where they are ranking for industry related keywords like SEO, search engine optimisation, SEO company and so on.

3.      Contact previous clients

This is probably the best method for seeing if they are using bogus testimonials, fake achievements and so on. Call some of their previous clients and ask them if they are satisfied with their rankings, how the “partnership” went etc.

4.      Avoid “number 1 guarantee” services

Nobody can predict how Google will rank a website and claims like top 3 guarantee should not be taken into consideration. SEO means dedication and hard work and top rankings usually come only after a good period of time, depending on the industry/keywords difficulty. Again, no one can guarantee a certain spot in search engine results!