Choosing the right SEO company

Chances are if you went to buy a car or even stationary for your business you would have a good idea what you wanted, what was good quality and what good value was for money. This is not always true when trying to hire a SEO company or someone to do your internet marketing. One of the reasons for this, is that the service you considering are buying is not . You can hold it, touch it or even measure the time put in, because one company can often do more in less time if they are more qualified.
Just the way the process works makes search engine optimization difficult to capture in terms of a rate per hour. It is very possible to get one site to link to your site which can deliver fantastic improvement in search engine rankings, which may only take 10 minutes of work, or spend weeks and weeks link building to get only a small improvement in SEO, such is the process of link value. So this makes it difficult to quantify what exactly is your chosen SEO company doing for you.
The first thing you need to do is a bit of research to understand some basic principles that SEO Companies should explain when you talk to them for the first time. You can decide if they are pulling a line, or actually being very fair with their reasons why it will cost so much and why it may take longer for results than you think. There are a few online SEO tutorials out there and will not take much finding. Just 10 minutes here and there will give you enough basics, just to understand more the challenges a professional SEO company has. It is more than administration work.
All professionals should be looking at search engine mastery in their field, but that does mean they will expect to be paid what their worth, which compared to adverts in high volume sales magazines or newspapers can still be one of the cheapest form of marketing out there. So how do you choose which SEO company to work with once you have done a bit of tutorial research?
You should always employ a SEO Company on what they achieve; irrelevant of the time it took to achieve it. After all you want traffic to your website, which is what you are really buying. A professional SEO company will have a network of sites that can link to your, will never use black hat techniques and at first will probably work on your site for a time well beyond what you are paying them. But when results step in, you may find that it takes much less work to get your results. But now you have the income.
So the first question you ask is what results have you achieve for previous clients? Ask then where the starting point was for positions on search engines and then ask where they are now and what sort of realistic time did it take? If they ask for a 12 month contract, then consider asking for a 3 month target, a 6 month target and then the time you would expect to see your desired position, bearing in mind that the further up the rankings you get, the harder and slower it becomes to advance.
Beware of easy to get search terms that they proudly say they have achieved. Use you basic new knowledge to know that this search was hard to get and must have been done by a professional, but this search term, anyone could have delivered. Just follow these rules and you are most of the way there to a long professional relationship with the right SEO Company.