There are so many unethical SEO companies that claim to be able to boost your website to #1 in search engine rankings, however they use overwhelmingly aggressive marketing techniques and attempt to manipulate search engine results. This gives the industry a bad name.

The main problem with SEO companies is that they base their methods and techniques on research trial and error and speculation. As a result of the secretive indexing criteria of search engines, webmasters and SEO companies can only make an educated guess about the ranking systems and possible algorithm revisions.

SEO companies may be able to achieve high search engine rankings for your website because they are good at what they do, however the way they do it can be precarious and dangerous.

Some SEO companies may use 'Black Hat' techniques to manipulate search engine results to their advantage. These techniques are high-risk and even illegal, and can get a site banned from search engines. Black Hat techniques can cause severe damage to the business of an e-commerce company.

Here are a few examples of 'black hat' techniques:

•Hidden text/hidden links: stuffing your pages with keywords or links too small to read or the same color as the background, so viewers are unable to see any difference in the aesthetics of the page.

•Cloaking: using browser or bot sniffers to serve the search engine spiders a different page than the page visitors see. It is used to show an optimized page to the search engines and a different page to viewers.

•Multiple submissions: submitting your domain and pages to search engines, for example submitting http://www.logobee.com and http://www.logobee.com/samples as two separate urls.

•Link farms: sites created solely for the purpose of search engine ranking. These sites are nothing more than random links which have no relevance to one another.

•Selling PR: sites that sell their high PR links for a fee through direct advertisement and for the sole purpose of increasing link popularity.

•Doorways: having one page stuffed with keywords that re-direct to another more user friendly page.

•Meta tag abuse: having too many keywords in the meta-tag description, title and keywords.

I am not implying that all SEO companies use 'black hat' techniques. There are some that use safe techniques, however I am only pointing out that relying on an SEO company to achieve top-level rankings for your website is a gamble.