A good search engine optimisation (SEO) company should not need to advertise their services through PPC advertising, but should appear naturally high in the search engine rankings. Therefore avoid any SEO company that advertises through PPC listings.

Ideally we would recommend choosing any company that appears high in the rankings for words such as ‘Suchmaschinenoptimierung‘. However some of the companies in the top few places are using short term ‘unethical tactics’ that are frowned upon by Google. These risk being dropped from Google. If a company uses such tactics on their own website, then we advise not using them as you risk your website being removed completely from Google.

The best choice is therefore a search engine optimisation company that appears on the top few pages of the search engines AND guarantees only to use ethical techniques.

Other deciding factors might be:

* Will the SEO company give client references or example websites?
* Are you tied into a long contract? Good SEO companies will not need to do this.
* Does the Internetagentur have an established track record. We are surprised how many ‘SEO companies’ have a large portfolio of websites with little or no Google PageRank.
* Who does the SEO work? Many ‘top SEO companies’ outsource this as well. In 2007 some ‘top SEO companies’ are spending over 2,000