SEO Expert vs. Opportunist

When someone says they know their stuff concerning Search Engine Optimization there always a good reason to be suspicious. With SEO being a new field there is a lot of BS around, and they are just looking to pray on potential clients that know less about SEO than they do. These opportunist talk big, but there results are minimal.

When "SEO Firms" Offer this run away:
1) Submission into Thousands of Different Search Engines
--My services at Help Get Your Website Found include 130 Search Engine Submissions which account for 98% of the world's search engine traffic. The Opportunist may like throwing out big numbers, but how important can submission to 1,870 different search engines be if it only accounts for 2% of world traffic.
2) Links to Millions of Other Sites Instantly
--If step one is useless, this step is dangerous. Having credible links to your website that also follow Google guidelines will cause your raise your PageRank and your Google listings. However, if you link with a million of these random websites overnight chances are that they are garbage. If Google sees you getting links from these useless sites chances are they will lower your ranking and hurt your rankings. Listings are good, but only if they are kosher.

3) Directory Listings in some insane number
-- Directory Listings are important for inbound links, and they can be a nice way of generating more traffic. To get listed in 10 site specific to you and your website However, when a site tells you that they are going to post 1,000 directory entries it might as well be 45,000,000. These numbers are useless and unless they can tell you where you are listed, how these directories will be beneficial to your inbound links, and if they submit them individually or by just sending a mass spam e-mail to all these "directory editors."

4) A set hour amount for your job
--Finally the people who can do every SEO Job in a set number of hours. One SEO firm says that if you pay them $8,000 they will devout someone to your website for 756 hours. WOW. SEO takes time and effort, but it does not take 756 hours. This is a process and each site has different focuses in regards to SEO effectiveness and my guess is a firm that touts itself as "SEO Experts" are not necessarily able to tell into the future.