What to avoid in an SEO or SEM company

• Guaranteed placement: Search engines and search engine rankings are in constant flux and no legitimate or professional SEO company will guarantee placement on keywords of your choosing. The traffic and competition levels vary wildly across keyword phrases, and it is precisely for this reason that competition and keyword analysis are so important.
• Black Hat Techniques: There are a number of techniques such as keyword stuffing (adding your keywords throughout a site, sometimes hundreds of times), keyword hiding (i.e. putting black text on a black background), and cloaking (showing search engines a different page than human visitors), that will often result in your site being penalized or removed completely from search engines. Using these techniques on a company or corporate website is not appropriate yet many SEO companies will use such techniques without your knowledge or informing you of the risks.
• Outdated Information: Many web design companies will sell search engine optimization packages without having any specialized SEO employees and based on techniques that at best do not work and at worst can hurt your rankings and business. Meta-tag keywords, long a primary determinant of website search placement, are often no longer even looked at by search engines.
• Emphasis on Submission to Hundreds of Search Engines: In the early days of the internet there were dozens of independent search engines, producing their own data, that had a sizable user-base. However, today most of the smaller search engines pull their results directly from the major engines. Additionally initial submission to most engines is automated and once listed search engines will revisit a site on a regular basis. Today most major engines allow you submit XML 'sitemaps' which help spiders know what pages to visit and how often to visit. However many companies still attempt to use 'submission to hundreds of search engine' as a primary selling point when the days of that being important to driving traffic are long gone.