In all walks of life there are always plenty of people out there happy to take your money in exchange for empty promises and few regrets - Search marketing is no exception. Guaranteed search engine rankings, massive ROIs, the moon, they'll promise whatever they feel you want to hear to get you to part with your cash.

Do your homework before hiring your search marketing company or consultant. There are essentially three types of company you will come across when researching for a search marketing partner.

There are many companies who cold call prospective clients, informing them that their site is on a list of sites to be banned for link farming or spamming and that unless the prospect uses their search marketing services, Google will drop them. These companies basically know just enough seearch optimisation terms and expressions to convince lay people to think that they know what they are talking about. When it comes to ripping people off, they're expert, when it comes to Search Marketing - forget them.

Marketing companies offering 'Website Advertising Services', 'Search Engine Submissions', 'Free Search Engine Submissions', 'Website Traffic' are invariably a waste of your money and more importantly your time - Submission services are also just a little pointless. Search engines will discover your web site by crawling links from other sites that point to yours, you don't need to submit anything. This is a service you will most likely be offered from inexperienced search marketeers.

The next type of prospective search marketing partner to avoid are those with a narrow perspective of how the internet and search engines actually works. Probably with no or little experience, they'll apply the most inappropriate and ineffective search optimisation techniques. Employing unqualified or misguided search optimisers can risk damage to your site and reputation. A bad search marketing company or consultant, as well as wasting your time and money, may also do irreparable harm to your online business, even contributing to the failure of a new or unstable operations.

The final type of prospective search marketing partner to work with is one your hopefully want to work with, the experienced professional expert in search marketing applying the state of the art search optimisation techniques that will delver your online business goals.

Identifying the sharks is relatively easy. Differentiating between the 'dross' brigade and the real professionals is more difficult, especially for someone with limited search marketing experience themselves.

Of course you will take word of mouth referrals seriously, run searches on a company, ask for references, check their internet presence and show the due diligence necessary when researching a prospective partner to your online business. In addition, and perhaps the best thing to do, is to educate yourself in some of the dos and don'ts of search optimisation so that you can judge the quality of the advice you are being given.

Here are some of the classic negatives and big no's when it comes to search engine optimisation. If you're presented with any of these seven deadly sins, start asking why they have to be resorted to. If you don't receive satisfactory answers then simply 'run' away - you'll have exposed a company who won't really be able to offer you the quality of search marketing your business needs.

Keyword stuffing - Yes, target keywords, keyword phrases and closely-related terms should appear in the page title, description meta tag, and page copy. Stuffing and shoehorning keywords into copy is so passé. Not only that but it can seriously damage your Internet presence; at best burying your site and at worst leading to it being delisted. Matt Cutts of Google says on his blog, "As always, webmasters are free to do what they want on their own sites, but Google reserves the right to do what we think is best to maintain the relevance of our search results, and that includes taking action on keyword stuffing".

Meta Tags - More old school SEO, meta tags do nothing to improve your rankings other than possibly marginally on Yahoo!. The one that really counts is the description tag. It may not help with your ranking, but it may be used as the description of your site in the Google results. Avoid companies obsessing over meta tags and their use as a selling point.

The anchor text at the bottom of the page SEO technique - used to encourage spiders and deep links. Overdo it and it's excessive over-linking.

The high inbound link to one page looks like link farming to the search engines. A professional SEO company will apply techniques such as link bait, articles, press releases, and online public relations to generate quality inbound links not only to your home page but to deep links to pages in the site. Link quality is much more important than link quantity, so look for companies that focus on building good links for you.

Hidden Keywords - If you use hidden text such as white on white text or hidden with a div tag you run the risk of being penalised. It's cheap and it's shabby. Avoid this and all other tricks.

Don't over elaborate your pages with h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, bold or italic SEO techniques. There are advantages to properly organising your on-page formatting, but when it turns into a technique that is trying to outsmart the system it starts to be counter productive.

If submit your site to 5000 directories and 3,500 search engines you can forget about appearing in the top 10. The crawler-based search engines will find your site more quickly as soon as you get a link from another web site already being crawled. Search engine submission died a few years ago. If search optimisation companies start talking big numbers and automation when it comes to site submission, show them the door.

None of these techniques reflect favourably on a search marketing company. You can't help but ask yourself why a company would have to resort to trying to fix the system when there are numerous techniques that, if applied correctly and professionally, can achieve enormously and effective results.

If a prospective search marketing company is talking about thorough keyword and audience analysis, world class copywriting, solid link building, on topical content, authority site augmented, aged domains and social bookmark viral marketing techniques, then keep listening. They're talking a language that will generate visits to your site. To talk to Peter Woolf about any of these essential components of your successful internet marketing campaign.