But even if you get #1 right you’ll gain so much headway.

An SEO who offers you a price without even looking at your site is probably not a good SEO. They should do a needs assessment with you to find out what it is you are looking for, as well as taking a look at your site to see what is required before even talking cost.

More often than not, the clients I deal with generally lack a decent number of links pointing to their site. This means that there are more other sites linking to their competitors then their own site.

However if this is the case, there is no quick fix. Link building takes time. And don’t think throwing more money at link building is the solution. A good SEO knows to balance the number of links with the time it takes to acquire them. If they promise better results if you spend more over a shorter period of time I’d steer away from them because this isn’t how link building works.

For onsite changes, I’ve found it’s best to have a tech person on staff to make the changes. Some SEO firms offer that service as well and if so then you will want to know the in-house tech guy’s qualifications as well. Remember this is your business, you don’t want them to break something on your site because they aren’t experienced.

One more thing. Don’t expect the firm you are looking for to rank highly for “search engine optimization” or “search engine marketing” today many firms have niche’s they market to whether they are geographic or service specific. just because you can’t find them ranking where you think they should be doesn’t mean they aren’t good at their job. It just means they expect to be found somewhere else. What you could do is to look at their meta tags (select view, source from your browser menu) find some terms there and then search for those terms. If you still can’t find them, that’s a cause for concern.

Finally, if you do chose a firm, find out how long the people working on your account have been doing this. Sometimes you will find firms who claim to have been around for 10 years and may in fact have been, but many of their employees may have less than 2 years experience. So try and find someone whose employees have enough experience to handle your site.

Most SEO consultants aren’t doing anything worthwhile for your business. Instead, invest in someone who can help improve your content and implement important, but basic, site changes for search engines.

The content you produce is way more important than your keywords or meta tags…

I would also add that it pays to offer a GENERAL project outline for a potential SEO client. SEO is mostly behind the scenes and driven by web research and web participation – the person hiring you rarely knows what you are doing and how/when you are doing it.

Thus, plotting the process reduces the client’s anxious wondering.