SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is something that everyone should be doing (if you have a website) and that everyone should be learning about - it's that important.
Unfortunately there are times when doing SEO on your own business is not possible.
Maybe you don't know enough about it yet or maybe you just don't have the time.
Whatever reason it is isn't important - you just need to know how to get the best out of an SEO company and how to get your money's worth.
The problem with most SEO companies is that their knowledge, experience and results are very difficult to measure since new pages, sites and links are always being built in an ever changing landscape.
The best way to size up any potential SEO expert/company that you are thinking of hiring is to ask them a few questions to see if they really know their stuff.
This is a lot easier if you already know about SEO, but if you don't here's a few example questions that you can ask: - How do you build links? - What kinds of links do you build? - What other projects have you worked on in the past? - What else will you do to improve my site's ranking? - What tools do you use? - What is your biggest failure in SEO? Remember that no SEO company should ever guarantee you a ranking, since they don't control Google and no-one really knows the inner workings of their algorithm.
The only thing they should guarantee you is an increase in rankings over time.