Unfortunately, due to the huge volume of competition for positions within search engines, especially the ubiquitous Google, for any highly competitive search word or search phrase, and, in particular for any relatively new site, it is almost impossible to get good rankings without tricks.

As a result many search engine optimisation companies resort to desperate measures, and deploy dubious techniques. These often work, for a period, but if a competitor spots that you are using a trick, they could report you to the search engines for abuse, and they may drop your site from their indices for an unspecified period of time.

As to whether or not the tricks used are "ethical" or "unethical", it is understandable why search engine optimisation companies resort to them - simply because it can be so difficult in such a highly competitive arena to get anywhere. There are many 'dubious' people in the search engine optimisation business, but there are many perfectly legitimate companies who have been pushed into using such dubious techniques simply in order to survive.

Here are some of the most common tricks:

• Meaningless or badly written pages loaded with excessive repetitions of a keyword. It is no use being at No. 1 in Google if the displayed result does not attract the user to click on the link, or if the resultant page that the user lands on does not attract them to buy your products or services.
• So called "guaranteed No.1 positioning" ? for obscure, long keyword phrases which no-one is ever likely to enter in a search engine, or for quoted keyword phrases. The latter is a very cunning trick. A SEO company may offer to get you to number one for "this phrase" - seems innocent enough until you realise that they mean that phrase literally, i.e. with the quotes included. Quoted keyword phrases are used when looking for an exact match, but most users rarely use exact-match searches - they simply don't know how to!
• Hiding keywords within the HTML code, e.g. by use of the <!--comments--> tags or via "invisible" text where the text is set to be the same colour as the background.
• Using "link farms" (web pages consisting of meaningless lists of links) to boost search engine rankings. Many search engines, especially Google, place heavy emphasis on link popularity, and link farms were set up to exploit this. Google is now getting wise to this trick. As of February 2005 Google has taken action to reduce the impact of reciprocal linking of this kind.
• "Shadow" domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects.
• "Cloaking" which delivers a different page to a search engine from the one that users actually see.
• Pages which belong to the SEO Company and only exist for as long as you keep paying the SEO Company. Such pages blur the distinction between optimisation on the one hand, and advertising on the other hand where you pay for an advert to appear for a specified time. This is fair enough if the terms and conditions are made clear, but this is not always publicised, and I have seen a case where one such page was used to direct search engine users to another website after the client had (presumably) stopped paying!
• The SEO Company may deploy sponsored listings - this again is really a form of advertising and has the disadvantage that your pages may only appear for the duration of the subscription. Again, it is a matter of transparency. Nothing is wrong with this method if it is clearly indicated that this is really a form of advertising and has limited time duration. We use sponsored listings to promote our sites. Meaningless statistics. Do not be deceived by "hits". Hits are a measure of the number of server calls - a page with lots of images will generate lots of hits, because each image requires a server call. Also many visits to websites are not human beings, but "bots" - automated systems such as search engine spiders and spam robots seeking to harvest email addresses.

(Meaningful, sustainable, legitimate) No. 1 rankings cannot be guaranteed - search engine optimisation is NOT an exact science - no-one knows exactly what the search engine algorithms are, and the algorithms are changing all the time - it is educated guesswork based on experience. There are companies who offer money-back guarantees - one can only surmise that they must charge a small fortune, and be giving out a lot of refunds, or using some tricks!

There are some very fine search engine optimisation companies who do use legitimate techniques. However, these are often very expensive (legitimate companies may well charge you over a £1000 up front and monthly maintenance payments of over £200). We would strongly recommend that you do NOT use a company who simply say "just hand over your site to us and let us get on with it". Always use companies and individuals who explain to you exactly how they are going to go about the process, and who leave YOU in control of your own site. Be particularly wary of any company who wants to move your site to another server. And do not waste your money subscribing to services which will "submit your site to 1000 search engines". There are only four major spidering search engines, and these ban automated submissions, and, please note, automated querying. Most SEO companies provide you with results statistics based on such automated querying, which is actually a violation of the terms of service of search engines.