My interest to write this article was spurred by a piece of spam email that I had recieved earlier in day. It was from a company that was claiming to help me build my "link popularity" by buying link packages off of them.

The email was actually well written, and it definately gained my interest enough that I figured I would check it out. There were even 3 testimonials that sounded like this was THEE place to be if you wanted top search engine rankings.

Upon visiting site, which was nicely designed, and very professional looking, I started to "play". Within less than 5 minutes I abruptly left site, and will never go back....WHY?

Well, let me explain;

If you are ever contemplating paying somebody big bucks to do SEO work for you, there are few real easy tests you can run to determine if they are even worthy of you giving them time of day. These are so easy, a 10 year old can do them, and they can save you a bundle!

You will need Google Toolbar installed for these tests! Go to toolbar.google.com and download it for free. It only takes a few minutes to install.

The first thing I did was entered URL of their website in my browser in 2 different formats. One with www, and one without. The reason I do this, is because there are many sites out there that have different Google PR values with or without www. This is simply determined on how they promote and link their site. If I am losing you here, let me show you what I mean;