Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Will the SEO service provider share its optimization techniques with you?  Ask them for an overview of how they achieve results. If the firm won't give you an explanation, chances are the company is trying to hide unethical techniques.

Is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) part of the SEO firm's strategy? Optimization results should not rely on PPC. Performance results for organic optimization and PPC should be evaluated separately.

Can the SEO firm guarantee your site will not be penalized and/or removed from the search engines and directory indexes? By using unethical techniques, many SEO firms may produce short term results, but in the long run will end up getting a client's website penalized or even banned from being indexed by the major search engines.

Does the SEO firm optimize more than your homepage - if so, how many pages? A good SEO firm will maximize the number of active pages on your website. It's more work for the SEO firm, but it will produce the greatest results for YOU.

Does the SEO firm provide an unrealistic guarantee? Any SEO company that guarantees a specific position (like number one or two) on Google or Yahoo are being dishonest. It is impossible to guarantee specific positions on search engines.

Are automated submission tools used or are all submissions processed manually? Automated tools can often lead to penalization and result in your site being excluded from the search engines.

If the plan includes link building, is the firm using a link farm?  Or is it contracting sites individually and concentrating on link reputation more than link popularity? Soon websites linked to and from link farms will be penalized and banned from the major search engines.

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. Google is particularly harsh on sites that use cloaking, and is known to remove them entirely when it finds them.  This falls under "Black Hat SEO Practices"

I would also ask - would the firm give me the login info to access  those places where the link was posted.

Absolutely NOT.

SEO firm don't give you permission to aacess the link page.

I want to ASk one question

What is the guarantee that my sites comes in 1st position in Google and after that how much time it stay in 1st position.

there is no guarantee what so ever regarding the position or the period of time that you will enjoy the position of your sit.

SEO is like a mechanic working on your car, you always need it to keep on driving... you stop paying the mechanic --> you cant drive anymore.

it's a big bubble out there, most SEO experts will not admit it.

"SEO firm don't give you permission to aacess the link page."

That's so that you won't see that they have posted your data to a link farm.

I would never pay for SEO services, but that's just me.  I might pay for good advice from an SEO expert, but I don't trust someone else with my brand.

BTW - I am not an SEO expert, but I can guarantee you the #1 spot on search engine results as long as I can define the search.

Hiring a search engine optimization firm can be a difficult process. A skilled SEO firm will help you significantly increase the impact of your web presence, while a lesser firm will waste your money, and damage your online reputation. Yet, at least from the outside, the two can look relatively similar.

My question is what way you promote flash sites in google search engine.

You know, in my opinion knowledge is power.  At least having an understanding prior to contracting with a firm is a good bet.  Its not that hard to get grounded in what SEO is and what it can and can't accomplish.  To me its then as simple as talking to a few of the firms clients and seeing where they rank, for how long they have ranked there and how much business they are getting.  Rank doesn't really matter as much as sales.

Here are two posts that can help you get grounded in SEO:

• What is SEO?
• How does SEO work?