Articles > Hiring an SEO Company
An SEO company can help you research good keywords to target, submit your site to directories, find other incoming link opportunities, and help you optimize your existing pages. Expect to pay a sizable fee for someone who is good.
Beware of anyone who says they can guarantee results--nobody can. The search engines keep their algorithms a secret and change them all the time to increase the quality of their results.
A good SEO company will encourage you to do things that will increase your long-term results, like develop good focused content, rather than use gimmicks designed to trick the search engine into ranking you higher. An old classic trick was to put a lot of keywords in white text at the bottom of each page where a visitor couldn't see them, but the search engine could. The problem with tricks is that the search engines companies work very hard to spot them and counteract them, and can even penalize your site for using them.
Some SEO companies will want to get you on an ongoing fee schedule--make sure you understand exactly what they will be doing each month for that fee. Are they going to be pursuing new incoming links? Letting you know about better keywords to target? If their answer boils down to "We'll send you a report of how your sites are doing", it's likely that they are just auto-generating those reports each month from their software and there aren't doing anything much to earn that retainer.
If you don't understand what they are offering to do in any situation, make them explain it further. SEO is not astrophysics and they should be able to explain what they are doing in terms you can understand. It is also helpful to do independent research on each strategy so you know what you are getting into. For instance, buying text links sounds like a good idea, but it is in fact a highly debated one. A good place to get opinions from industry experts is the Google Search forum at Webmaster World.
Good luck!
