Xavier Media®

I get contacted daily from Indian SEO consultants claiming to be professional SEO experts. While some of them may be professionals, most of them are unfortunately not. Now you may ask how I know they are Indian SEO consultants and how I know they may not be professional.The first thing is easy. If they're surfing using AirtelBroadband.in as ISP they are clearly from India.

The second thing is something we noticed from people that had their articles submitted to one of our sites. The so called professional experts use shady (black hat) SEO techniques which leads to their client web sites getting hit by Google's Penguin update, algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that use black hat techniques like for example keyword stuffing. Their clients will then have to contact sites to have the inks to their sites removed, which is very time consuming and also costly (because the time wasted on having links removed could have been used for developing your site instead).

So before you contact an expert you should get some references and make sure they know what they do. Some of the professional companies offering Search Engine Optimization services also provide a free SEO analysis or a free quote where they show you some tips before they start charging you. This analysis should show you the basics you need to know to be able to figure out if they know what they're doing.

Checklist for finding a good expert:

1. Don't just focus on the price
2. Check for references (preferably someone that was a client before th Penguin update)
3. Ask for a free SEO analysis, if they can't provide that there are others
4. Check when they registered their domain name, if it was just last month ask why.

About the author
Andreas co-founded Xavier Media® in 1996 and has since been involved in all kinds of development, marketing and making money online.