Five Questions to Ask Your SEO Company (And the answers you want to hear)

SEO has rapidly become one of the most recognized acronyms in the internet marketing world. Search engine optimization can help your site's audience grow by feeding you lots of new readers from the search engines, and as much as folks would like to tell you that the search engines are only one part of your internet marketing strategy, they're a pretty hefty part. The current estimates are that about 85% of all internet users turn to search engines when they're looking for information, products or services.

The drive to be ranked high on the major search engines - Google, Yahoo and MSN - has spawned an entire industry focused on optimizing web sites to be more friendly to search engines. Site optimization for a mid to large size web site can easily eat up weeks of your time if you try to do it yourself and that's AFTER you spend a few weeks learning all there is to know about SEO. It's not surprising then, that so many companies turn to experts to optimize their web sites and get them high rankings in the search engine results pages. If you're looking for a good SEO company to handle optimizing your site, you can learn a lot about them by the answers to a few simple questions.

1.To which search engines will you submit my site?
A lot of SEO companies will make extravagant claims that they'll submit your site to dozens, hundreds or even a thousand search engines. Ask people you know to name the search engine that they use, though, and nearly every one will give you one of three names Google, Yahoo and MSN. Submission to other search engines is just window dressing. Don't be impressed by claims that they'll get you listed on dozens of search engines. You can do that yourself in ten minutes a day.

2.What techniques do you use to get my site listed high in the search engine results?
Certain techniques look great on paper but are strictly against the guidelines of most search engines. Any technique that hides keywords from your readers or shows the search engine a different page than the one that regular visitors would see is considered black hat SEO', and could result in getting your site bounced from the search engine results entirely.

3.Will you guarantee me first place ranking in the search results?
The answer you want to hear to this question is 'no'. As nice as it would be to believe that a company can guarantee you top billing in the search results if you just pay enough, any company that tells you they can is either lying or shading the truth.

4.How will you increase the number of people who link to my site?
Link building is a vital part of SEO, and the number of quality incoming links that your pages have will help determine their ranking by at least one of the major search engines, Google. However, links to 'link farms' and reciprocal linking schemes can damage your site's standing rather than help it.

5.How fast will I see results?
Building search engine rankings organically is a long-term process. You won't see overnight changes. The answer you get to this question should emphasize that, or you're getting sold a shoddy bill of goods. Expect any SEO strategy to have a timetable of several months, with periodic benchmark goals.

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