[garry22]

all the bad seo's guarantee top 4  good ones don't

Spot on Adam.

If they guarrantee a position, then I would suggest that they lie about other things too!

The other thing is that if you try and do it too quickly you could well get G - slapped.

The only way to guarrantee a position is with Adwords.

Garry

[Nick W]

How many people here have had  their websites optimized, for the areas they cover? The bloke who made up my website wants £500 to do it, over two months.

The key thing here is to pay to get SEO based on results- if someone wants money per month without guaranteeing eg top 4 for your chosen phrase then find another supplier. I have found a quote for results based SEO and gone ahead

all the bad seo's guarantee top 4 good ones don't

But if you only pay them when they get top 4 they have an interest in getting you there?

[garry22]

Would you take on a job if you only got paid when the site reached a certain position (at the whim of the search engines)?

The SEO guy would most likely use link farms or spam bookmarking for a really quick fix.

Then, a couple of weeks after they have been paid, the site gets slapped for violating Webmaster rules and drops like a stone.

The next SEO person would have to work longer and harder to get the site back to it's previous position.

I can see your argument but most decent SEO people would not get involved.

[Adam P]

getting to the top is not a problem, it's staying there which is what you want to pay for.  as garry has said they'll most likely be using quick fix tricks which google will often see as black hat ways to improve serp. some will give good results, others will give terrible results.

read their terms and i bet it says they only need to get you to top 4 once. also what are the keywords used to find you? i love it when the cold call and say they'll get me found in top position for when someone searches for my business. well duh! if someone types in green clean solution i hardly expect to get much competition