Internet Advancement seems to be out of business Redmond Washington

It appears that Internet Advancement Inc is out of business after the Washington Attorney Generals office ordered them to refund hundreds of customers money. Their site is down and so is 4greatbuys.com which was the site where they put all the links. Their phone is also disconnected. I too was a victim of internet advancement. I can tell you from my experience that SEO is probably something that you should do on your own.
You can list yourself on the 3 major search engines free of charge. If you do advertisements, you will automatically get added. In fact, advertising is the #1 way to get people to your site and also the fastest.
Build incoming links - Incoming links will get your website climbing the search engines. However, these should be high quality links because as I have found with internet advancement that quantity of links no longer matters. They created hundreds of links to my site but because they were so low quality they had no affect on my rankings. The problem I believe is that they never had any traffic. I'm convinced that if they had spent money on google, yahoo, and msn adwords, the program would have worked. The search engines actually take into account the traffic you get to your site. The more traffic, the better.
A myth that they said and many SEO firms claim is that several keywords repeated in your meta tags will make you rank higher. I found several examples that this is a myth. Many of my manufacturers only have their name on the front page. They spent no money on SEO companies yet they came in first place on Google, Yahoo, and MSN for the products they manufactured. I asked myself WHY?
I truly believe the reason is that their customers whose websites were about these products put links to the manufacturers website for additional information. The manufacturer's site was also about the same products which told the search engines that their site was highly relavant since many people not only visited their website but they visited them by clicking on the distributors pages.
Internet Advancement threatened to cancel my guarantee if I didn't list out all of my keywords in page description. Not only do I think this looks very unprofessional because this is what searchers see on the search engines, you get less customers. IE. computers, gaming computers, pentium computers, desktop computers, laptop computers. These are keywords that you want customers typing them in to find you but a potential customer would probably click much more often on a description like this. Buy great quality computers at low prices at ......
I was convinced that this would get me more traffic and have no effect on my rankings with google and my sales increased.
These are just some tips to try before gettting ripped off by some SEO company. If you don't have time to do your advertising then hire an internet advertising agency. At least you will get a decent ROI if you have something your customers want.
Anyway, I called today to cancel all of my accounts, over $30,000 of my hard earned money. Phones were disconnected and the website was down. The only thing I found were details of the lawsuit by the Washington Attorney Generals office. I just don't want others to get hurt as I did.

Andrew
Rio Grande Valley, Texas
U.S.A.