In Houston SEO is still an underdeveloped part of Internet marketing.

SEO for the Houston market is like taking a trip back in time.

Houston advertisers and agencies mostly don't get SEO yet.  The Houston SEO industry as a whole on the other hand is years behind other large city markets.  Search engine optimization was the great unknown until lately. Nonetheless in case you take a look at most of the websites seemingly professional SEO companies have, you might think that they don't practice real SEO at all. They buy links instead to artificially inflate their Google rankings. If you're not familiar with paid links? They are prohibited by the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Many agencies offer optimization services like back in the days where PageRank and rankings was everything you had to take care of.

Many SEO specialists won't tell you anything about things like Conversions or ROI (Return on Investment). They won't speak about local SEO and when referring to social media optimization they will talk about submitting to dozens of social bookmarking sites for "free links".

On the other hand most of the blogosphere in Houston assumes that SEO has something to do with spamming, especially with blog spam. 

SEO in Houston is still largely in the phase the Internet was before the emergence of the Web 2.0.  You can write link bait articles for social news sites. 

Difficulties In Finding A White Hat In Houston:

There really is a problem with so called black hat SEO in Houston. Most people, even most clients believe that SEO is about "manipulating" results and not

improving website usability

writing fresh, quality content

making it readable for readers and spiders

This misinterpretation goes so far that we sometimes have to disappoint potential clients when they ask us to use tricks. Many of them do not even think of real SEO before asking me for black hat techniques. Of course we refuse.  We value our image as the Houston specialist for white hat SEO.

We only optimize fully compliant with Google's guidelines. It's sometimes difficult because Google never fully clarifies what's OK and what not, the guidelines remain very fuzzy and the criteria change unexpectedly without being declared as such. Some common sense allows you to predict or assess the outcome yourself though.

Respectable clients new to this business often are unable to distinguish the black and the white hats because the line is even blurry for the experts themselves. Many even fall for services offering search engine submission to over 1000 search engines. They ignore one crucial fact:  On the Houston market only about 10 search engines have a substantial market share.