There are 3 things you need to know before hiring an SEO company for search engine optimization. The first thing is to find out which services are necessary and which ones are optional. The second step would be to understand how to differentiate between good and bad providers. The third step is working out how long it will take, because this will then determine what sort of results to expect, and the size of the team and budget.

Each component is categorized as an off-site or on-site service. The campaign begins with onsite work, which starts with analysis of existing traffic and research to come up with a keyword list for the site. In the next stage, the content will be optimized by tweaking existing pages and creating new ones that focus on the newly found keywords from the list.

There will be some website design and functionality changes involved, with fonts modified and scripts removed or added to make the site easier to use. The web host may be changed or the package upgraded. This will be done to enable faster page loading and other SEO-friendly options such as Class-C IP addresses.

It was necessary to explain this because many times SEO consultants lose sight of the big picture in the process of trying to push rankings up for specific keywords. This means practices like cloaking, redirections and stuffing pages with hidden text. Search engines will see a keyword heavy page while actual visitors will be seeing something entirely different.

Stay away from such providers and stick to a golden rule that all on-site work done will be expressly for improving the user experience. However, qualifying offsite optimization is not this easy. There are many services that may help and are quite ethical, but not exactly necessary. As a start, the only off-site components needed are a link acquisition campaign and establishing a presence on all the major social networks. A blog may come in useful in some cases.

Again, some consultants will want to get it over and done with quickly by setting up link farms and obtaining links from an inter-connected network of blogs and sites created expressly for the purpose of providing link juice for clients. The simple rule in this case is to avoid techniques that gather links which are not sending any direct traffic. Also, it helps if the links are from sites which happen to be in or about the same business.

Lastly, there is the question of the time needed to achieve results. The result here means the site pages should start ranking in the top 10 for the keywords chosen. If it is a large site with hundreds of pages and established competitors in the same space hogging the top results, then it will require a team effort for at least a year to get past the others and close in on first page rankings.

Smaller sites with only 5 or 10 pages and niche keywords where the competition is not so intense can get it done in 3-6 months without a big team. Again, the reason for all this detail is to point out that any consultant who offers to provide instant results within a month should be avoided. Such short-cuts will only get the site banned and the pages chucked out of the search index. With a better idea of the 3 things you need to know before hiring an SEO company, look for a provider who happily agrees to these guidelines.

You can find a summary of the things you need to know before hiring a SEO company and more information about a leading provider of Internet marketing services, today.