Junk SEO
The masses of bogus SEO companies that are springing up are frightening. They are very convincing and most all have the same tactic of guaranteeing rankings in Google. The problem is that most only target useless keywords. Then when they rank on page 1 for these useless keywords they shove the unhappy client away by pointing to their success.
I recently ran across this site by accident which boldly claims “GUARANTEE You’ll Make It On Google!”.
They show many fuzzy screenshots pointing to their success for their clients in Google such as this one from the bottom of the page:
I was suspicious so I downloaded the image and zoomed in. Turns out that the hot item they ranked #1 for in Google was a press release titled “Vegan Shopping New Springtime Additions” for their poor client AlternativeOutfitters.com.
The problem is people don’t want to know the real answer. Which is to produce highly relevant content which is of real value so people will link to it.
They would rather invest far more effort and money in looking for “cheats” and “hacks” which will only get eliminated as Google tries to improve itself. This is a great article at Clicka by Shari Thurow