If you are not in a hurry to get to top SERPs - you can save much money for doing seo all by yourself. Keep reading seo forums and blogs though.
I agree that many SEO companies probably use blackhat. How use can you gain rankings so fast besides using the latest flavor of the week tecnique such as anchor bombing which eventually gets figured out by google and you loose your rankings maybe even get a penalty. There are good SEO companies though, usually they are web design/seo companies.
Do your research on what good SEO is before hiring a company or an expert. Also - find an SEO with coding experience that can actually handle the on page seo work and not have to rely on a third party. Anyone can be a consultant, but not anyone can do the work!
Like everything, there is good, bad and ugly. I have not got time to SEO and spend hours a day working on backlinks so I outsource. I found good contacts on scriptlance - i only pay on results and use their site escrow service. I find that the asian companies are usaully the best at getting instant good rankings and then i swap the company for a slowburner U.S. company when the site is high rankings on good keywords.
Depends on your content.. A seo company, even the biggest one, will be a complete failure if your content is not at least somewhat good. Seo companies do work, but you can also do a similar job with dedication
Many "SEO" companies I've seen know less about SEO than the majority of members here at DP but I have had good experiences with one, lazyurl.
That's because people who go for SEO service generally already have a great business/content on their site. They just need that extra push with SEO to the front of SERPs.
Wait dear, do you know SEO companies like us are experts in SEO. We do the best optimization for our clients. We make the best efforts to take their site on the top link of search engines .We do offpage as well as onpage optimization. We people specially take care for black hat SEO. So, our site will not to be ban on search engine. I think only one person is not able to take care for all these things and also take more time to optimize a web site according to search engine. We people can do SEO on the strategy of search engine because algorithms of search engine are changing in certain period of time.
Be careful when hiring someone, When I webmastered for Gambling.com we hired an SEO company to keep on top of the day to day tasks. Within 2 weeks we had slipped from many top positions to page 4 or more. Needless to say we cut out that problem and developed our own guidelines. We then hired someone to follow these new guidelines. So be careful, you may end up with an opposite effect. Best of Luck, HomeComputerGames
SEO is a long term project and most people do not have the time to spend hours on the internet building backlinks, writing articles, read forums and so on... That is why lots of people hire SEO companies, to do the legwork for them. Another reason why someone would hire an SEO company is because they have more backlink resources then most companies and can get the job done faster. of course, you have other companies that know nothing about SEO that want to hire someone to do it for them without having to worry about the headache. As someone who works for an online marketing company, I often get email from India, China and even the US asking our company to outsource our SEO services to them. We have been tempted to use other companies to outsource our SEO branch work overflow but everytime we ask them for references and work they have done none of them seem to want to reply back.
I think Best option is to Do all work by yourself. I have never met a SEO company who Fullfills what they said & what i need.
some ppl are too lazy to read and learn about seo, why would i pay someone money when i can do it myself, and by doing the seo if anything go wrong you know exactly what happens, if seo company did a quick job for you and things goes wrong you have absolutely no idea what went wrong. so read and read and read about implementing seo on your site instead of paying some seo. why not buy some ebook for few quids.
No you have to Search an Expert for Organic SEO Because Organic is Long term .Rather than Paid like PPC campaign..
Well actually nobody can assure top ranking on Google or Yahoo, SEO companies can temporarily take you to the top ranking but if the search engines changes its plicy, your ranking will lost and you won't be able to find your website even in top 20 results.