If you search for “link building services” or “seo companies”, you will see thousands of independant SEO companies operating on the web. Go to their websites and most of them will promise you instant results for a “nominal” fee. But even though they “promise” you instant results, they never provide a guarantee.
According to my research, more than 90% of SEO companies provide little value to the user. The reason behind this is simply because they do not differentiate their products and services, and they are utilizing the already “used and abused” ways of conducting SEO.
For example, the majority of SEO companies that you find around the web provide “standard” solutions to users. The solutions mainly are: article marketing, directory submissions and search engine submissions.
The problem lies mainly with how they provide the service. Article marketing can be valuable, but most SEO companies submit the SAME article to 100 or 200 article directories. This decreases the value of the article due to duplication and also because a large portion of the directories they submit to are low quality directories.
SEO companies also submit to hundreds of web directories, but recent news suggests that Google has started to frown on low quality directories (hundreds of which are present on the web). And when SEO companies say they are doing to submit your website to “thousands of search engines”, you should just have a good laugh, because I highly doubt that there are more than 100 functioning search engines, and there are only 4 or 5 major search engines out there. So much for getting the information right.
The other 10% of the SEO companies provide a lot of value to the user. These SEO companies provide links from high quality, high PR websites and some of them even provide you links from a high PR page. They also provide customized solutions and have a “working knowledge” of SEO. The downside of such SEO companies is that they can be pretty expensive.
Here is a rule of thumb: If a SEO company provides only directory submissions, article submissions etc, they are not really providing value. For the price they charge you, you can pretty much do the submissions yourself. I would not be surprised if their profit margin is around 85-90%!
You should only hire an SEO consultant if he offers something different and whether he can provide a good track record. Remember, directory & article submissions is something anyone can do with minimum cost so you should not be spending your money on these services.