More Questions to Ask that "SEO Professional" you are considering using:
Does the SEO firm provide an unrealistic guarantee?
SEO providers that guarantee a specific position (like #1 or #2) on certain search engines (such as Google or Yahoo) are not being honest. It is impossible to guarantee specific positions on search engines. If they promise you #1 placement, ask them to do the first month free or require a written money-back guarantee!
Does the firm's technique involve showing one page to the visitor and a different page to the search engines?
If the answer is yes, then you are probably dealing with a search engine optimization provider that uses "cloaking" techniques. Many search engines specifically warn against this practice in the organizations' terms of service. You may get away with it for a while, but sooner or later it will come back to haunt you.
What kind of search engine saturation can the firm achieve?
While it's easy to focus on one particularly impressive position on one popular engine, it's more important to focus on a broad range of positions achieved on one site. It's entirely possible for a site to have one great ranking and be sorely lacking in positions for all other keyphrases. Ask your potential SEO company to show you a client report that demonstrates solid positions on leading search engines for many popular keyphrases. An effective SEO campaign will achieve maximum exposure across a broad range of keyphrases and engines.
Don't Get Banned!
Watch Out For SEO Companies Who Offer
* Regular website submissions to hundreds of search engines * Meta tag optimization * Reciprocal linking * Cloaking * Utilization of link farms * Duplicate web pages * Doorway pages * Keyword stuffing
Tips to Get You Top Rankings
* Make your site focused and relevant * Write lots of search engine friendly content * Acquire relevant inbound links * Ensure that inbound anchor text is relevant * Utilize deep linking * Use alt tags * Create a sitemap * Optimize your title tags
Why Companies Choose Us
* We deliver Top Rankings legitimately!
* Our customer retention rate is close to 100%
* We truly care about your success, because we understand that your success is our success
* Our pricing is usually less than 1/2 that of our competition