blaze - 7:22 pm on Jul 4, 2004 (gmt 0)

My rule:

Never trust an SEO firm that wants to stay under the radar.

Good business means good branding. Anyone who is insecure about their brand is generally someone who wants to make money in very hit and run fashion. Profitable, perhaps, but in a way with generally weak morals. Not the kind of thing you want to write home to dad about.

While I agree that having #1 for SEO would probably make a firm too arrogant for their own good, getting high ranks for things like "SEO" do not equate cluelessness, pretty much by definition.

However, if you are talking about 'making money on the web' .. something *completely* different than SEO, then I would agree with the above statements.

SEO is about getting high ranking for groups of keywords.

Getting lots of converting traffic is not SEO. That's a different business entirely. That's the business that consults with SEO companies or have an SEO department if they are big enough. It generally involves a lot of things which are not specific to search engines.

To make it more clear, SEO companies are not marketing companies. They're filled with technical people who track search engines very carefully and ensure that they very very clear on all the latest ranking techniques and rules.

I like to work with SEO companies sometimes because they're usually pretty hands off and I'm not crazy about handing over precious business rules.