Here are five tricks used by the more unscrupulous internet marketing firms. Swindles such as these have been going on since the dawn of the internet and while some of them are just a cheeky way of getting a few pounds out of your marketing budget, some of them could cost you thousands and potentially cause long-term harm to your website.

Each of these is a scam in use today and is one that businesses we deal with have been caught out on in the past. We are highlighting them here so that you can see the types of tricks that exist and can hopefully spot them before handing over your cash.

Scam #1 - “We’ll put you top of Google for 10 of your keywords for only £200 a month”

This is a pay per click scam that has become pretty popular over the past couple of years, with a number of businesses we know falling for it, to their later regret. On the face of it, the offer seems like a good one: A company calls you saying they will put your website in the sponsored listings on Google and guarantees that your site will appear on the first page for only £200 a month. What they don’t tell you is that the search terms are ones that are rarely used so are cheap to bid on. For example, if you were an IFA that works nationally then bidding on the keyword “pension advice” would be expensive, but bidding on “independent pension advice in South Wales” wouldn’t be. These pay per click companies will bid on keywords like the latter so that not that many clicks happen, and when they do, the cost is minimal. Out of the £200, you may only receive a few pounds worth of clicks, with the company pocketing the other £190 or so as a monthly management fee.

We have also seen one company that doesn’t stop there. They will charge you an additional £50 set-up fee which they say is mandatory as it’s charged by Google. Whilst it is true that Google does charge an Adwords set-up fee, it is actually only £5, and it gets refunded out of your first few clicks anyway.

How can you avoid this scam? If anyone cold calls you offering pay per click advertising then perhaps it’s better not to sign up over the phone. Instead, take their details, stick them into a search engine, and have a look to see if they are associated with this type of con. If it looks genuine then find out whether they let you bid on the more competitive keywords or whether they just let you choose from low level ones.

Scam #2 - “We’ll submit your site to hundreds of search engines for only £10”

One of the oldest online marketing scams and one of the most pointless. The first thing you should be aware of is that there are only three main search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Bing) and they take up over 95% of all search queries made in the UK. Submitting a website to any others is a worthless exercise.

The next thing you need to know is that submitting a site to a search engine can potentially do more harm than good. For a long time it has been widely accepted within the online marketing world that search engines prefer to find websites via inbound links. It is believed that search engines will sooner show a website they find on their own, via another website, than one they are force fed through a submission.

If you have a new site then to get indexed, all you need is one link from a website that is popular with the search engines and your site will start showing in results pages within a matter of days or weeks.

There is a variation on this scam where companies try to get on-going money out of you by offering to re-submit your site regularly. Even if the above wasn’t true then this additional service is a complete waste of time as once the search engines know your site exists and have crawled it, they place you within their database, something they don’t need to be asked to do over and over again.

Scam #3 - “We guarantee to get you #1 on Google”

No-one can promise you the first position on Google. There are hundreds of factors that search engines use to determine the search results, many of which aren’t known to people outside of Google. If someone is making guarantees then it is highly likely that one of two things are happening. They may be offering to optimise your site for keywords that are of a very low competition level (much as the pay per click scam, above), or, more worryingly, there may be something dodgy going on.

Black hat techniques, such as cloaking and keyword stuffing, are used by some SEO companies to trick search engines into ranking a website. Whilst these often work in the short term, they can actually damage your website in the long-term. When the search engines discover that these techniques have been used they can penalise, and even ban your website from the search results. Don’t think it can’t happen to you either, as BMW once had their website disappear from Google thanks to some black hat work, and if it can happen to a company of that size, then it can happen to anyone.

Scam #4 - “We will give you 1000 links for only £9.99”

Whilst inbound link building is an important part of search engine optimisation, the links do need to come from quality, relevant websites. Buying links in bulk, through companies that have automated link submission systems will never bring in links from good websites in relevant fields.

The links will most likely come from spammy directories that no person and no search engine is ever going to bother with. Not only will the links be completely worthless but they could highlight to the search engines that something dodgy is going on and pose harm to your existing rankings.

Scam #5 - “We will build you a high ranking sales page on our site”

Whilst micro sites and separate sales pages can work for businesses there is one fairly common trick that should be avoided. The company offers to build a one-off page, branded with your logo, optimised for your keywords, and hosted on their business directory site. This sounds good as there are no hosting or web development fees for you, but what it lacks is control. The page is a part of their site, not yours, so your monthly fee is paying them to work on improving the ranking of a website that doesn’t belong to you.

If you ever decide that you no longer want the page then you are left with nothing, and they are left with a valuable asset that they can easily sell to one of your competitors. If you decide that coming up high on the search engines is a goal for your business then it is probably wiser to work on improving your site rather than someone else’s.

Microsoft has launched www.bing.com, a new type of search engine that they prefer to call a “decision engine”. The software giant hopes that the replacement for Live Search (which was the third most popular search engine in the UK, behind Google and Yahoo!) will change the way people use search engines. By offering users greater options in the search results and helping them find what they are looking for quicker, Microsoft believes it now offers what internet users have been looking for.

Bing certainly looks different to the other search engines. The large homepage image shows their intention to stand out from Google by avoiding the use of big white spaces. Once you perform a search however, the look and feel is instantly familiar to anyone who has used a search engine before.

When it comes to features, changes include a list of related searches along the top left hand side (Google places them at the bottom of the results) and a nifty little box next to each search result that you can choose to pop-up, with further information from that web page and a list of other pages from that site.

At a first glance, the algorithm seems to be centred much more around local results. Microsoft has shown an interest in local search for some time, and it looks like this could be their bid for that market. Some of the results are a little questionable at the moment, but you can bet that a lot of work will be put into making this Beta release a very strong search engine in the near future.

Will Bing successfully change the way we search? Will it start taking market share from Google and Yahoo!? Time will tell, but with the Bing marketing budget rumoured to be $100 million, you can bet that Microsoft think so.

Google has recently filed for a patent where part of the ranking calculation is made up by the click through rate of web pages that have previously been listed for that search. See here for in-depth details.

This means that if your site appears on the first page for "cheap MP3 players" below Amazon.co.uk but receives a higher rate of clicks for that keyword then there is a chance your site could start showing above theirs.

Search engine optimisation and in-bound link building could now only the first half of the battle when it comes to winning the search engine war. If people aren't clicking your listing then you may start slipping back down the results.

How do you combat this? Strong calls to action.

The search results show three things that you have control over: your page title, your meta description and your URL. Make them really work for you.

Page title - Along with making sure your main keywords are in here try adding a sales message that will help people click through, e.g. "Cheap MP3 Players. Huge selection of low price MP3 players."

Meta Description – This is where you should see a big difference. In the meta description you have up to 160 displayed characters, so can create a couple of really strong sentences that will entice searchers towards your site. Make sure you include the keywords a couple of times too. e.g. "Cheap MP3 players. Full range of MP3 players from iPods to Zens. Cheapest price guarantee plus FREE shipping."

URL - If you have search engine friendly URLs then make sure the keywords show, as this increases click through rates. e.g. www.example.com/cheap-mp3-players

This just goes to show that you never know what's next in the world of search engine marketing. Many search engine optimisation companies and webmasters have ignored meta desciptions for years, writing them off as 'old-hat' and of no real value. With this update though, spending time on your meta data will once again be a fundamental part of online marketing.

Some search engine marketers are already reporting changes in the ranking of their sites since the recent Google update, with many suspecting historic click through rates already playing a part.

The number of companies that invest in online marketing is growing by the day, and the amount they spend is growing by the minute. Investment in activities like search engine marketing, pay per click advertising, and social media marketing is now really starting to take money away from the more traditional, offline marketing campaigns. A new study from Forrester Research shows just how large this marketing budget shift will be.

Looking at companies in the US, Forrester expects the amount of money spent on internet marketing activity to increase from the $23 billion that was spent last year, to almost $55 billion in 2014. This extra money is, for the most part, being taken from the more traditional marketing avenues, like print advertising and direct mail.

60% of the companies interviewed by Forrester stated that to fund further ventures into the digital world they would be "shifting money away from traditional marketing." Only 14% of respondents said they would be increasing spend for online marketing as well as offline forms of marketing.

Direct mail is the traditional marketing method that will be hit the hardest over the next five years. 40% of companies said that they will be decreasing the amount spent here to fund further online activity. If the companies interviewed are representative of US businesses as a whole then print media will also feel a very real change. Owners of newspapers can expect a 35% reduction in advertising spend and magazine publishers will see client budgets drop by 28%.

With internet marketing proving itself more cost effective and easier to measure than traditional marketing campaigns, companies have been making the transition for years. This research shows that these changes are starting to accelerate, even though it is something that has been predicted by experts within the online marketing world for a while. Last month the Society of Digital Agencies released a report that showed how more than 87% of advertising agencies and 73% of digital marketing agencies have started moving their own marketing budgets from offline to online. If we’re all now doing this, then shouldn’t you be too?