I’ll probably be returning to see more, thanks for the info!

To determine whether an SEO company is ethical you have to understand what ethical SEO is and is not. There is something called “black hat” SEO. This is never a good thing. It tries to get high search results with unethical techniques. Black hat SEO basically can be recognized by the following characteristics:

breaks search engine rules and regulations
creates a poor user experience directly because of the black hat SEO techniques utilized on the Web site
unethically presents content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.

You need to familiarize yourself with what the search engines are looking for. Google, Bing and Ask.com all provide explanations of what they are looking for. Just run a search for web master tips or tools for each site.

Some ways you can recognize black hat SEO are:
Keyword stuffing – This is packing a long list of keywords into your pages and repeating them over and over.
Invisible text – this is placing keywords with the same foreground and background color. The search engines can see them but regular visitors can’t

The best way to determine if an SEO professional is ethical is to get a list of their customers. Visit their customer websites and view the source of their pages. You should not see any strange keywords that don’t appear when you view the page in your web browser.

The best SEO is done over time. Links from other sites occur naturally as you develop a reputation. People who claim they can get you listed as the number 1 search engine result for Google in 2 weeks are usually doing something unethical. It usually takes months for this to happen.