The whole search engine optimization industry is still affectively in its infancy. To begin with, SEO has been around only since about late 1996, early 1997.
This lays to bed the claims of a lot of companies that they have been in the business for years. It simply isn't feasible for someone to claim they have been performing search engine consultancy for 15 years or more, and if they have, then the stuff they were working on 15 years ago is a totally different kettle of fish to what we have today.
This cost of entry to this industry is so cheap that the skill levels of a lot of the "SEO Specialists" is questionable at best, and their offerings may as well be classed as an SEO Scam due to them even pretending to be able to provide a service.
Unfortunately, there are a growing number of bad SEO companies and SEO scams that prey upon naive site owners. Before you consult with an SEO company protect yourself from falling prey to an SEO scam artist and educate yourself first.
If you're in the market for either advice or a consultant to perform SEO on your website then there are some very easy things to do that could save you a lot of grief later.
Don't be afraid to ask some questions!
If they can't respond to you in the language of your website perfectly, then they probably won't be able to optimize the site for customers to read it properly. Bad English on my site is allowed (it's my site!) but if I'm looking at a professional site, this turns me off right away. I don't doubt that this will be the same for any language
Can they give examples of sites they have worked on in the past?
I'm not talking about having worked on a 3 million page massive site, but if they can't even point you to a personal website of their own, then what are they doing advertising their services? You are not paying them to train themselves on the job :P
What will they be doing and how will they do it?
While this is the bit that most people are scared off it's the most important.
Don't be worried about not understanding the jargon. SEO is the same as ANY technical field, in that half the jargon is there to make the engineers look clever. They aren't and it's all ABA (another bloody acronym). Don't trust anyone to perform anything on your site that they can't explain. It either means they don't actually fully understand what they will be doing or they will be performing some kind of bad SEO.
What sort of reports can you expect to get for your cash? With the number of free tools and utilities available in this market, they should get something that makes sense to you. When they send a report to you, make sure you understand what it actually means. If they can't tell you then they have just run your site through a reporting program for the look of it. You could have done that yourself.
Source from : seo-myths.com