If you do business on the internet, you know how important SEO is to the success of your company. Comprehensive SEO can increase your search engine rankings and thus increase the traffic to your website. While some business owners enjoy taking on the challenge of SEO themselves, others choose to hire SEO professionals to do it on their behalf. If you're part of the latter group, consider these 6 ways to screen SEO professionals before hiring one.



1. Who Called Whom? If an SEO professional calls you first, be wary. Unless they are just starting out in the business, quality SEO professionals should be too busy working for their clients to be making cold calls. The greatest irony in receiving a cold call from an SEO professional is that SEO professionals should be experts at marketing. And if they can't find their own clients without cold-calling, how do you expect them to find clients for your business?

2. Check Out Their Search Rankings. Anytime you're researching SEO professionals, make sure to look carefully at their search engine rankings. Some SEO professionals invest heavily in paid links while spending a minimal amount of time on optimizing for a few keywords. Paid links are expensive, which means that an SEO professional relying heavily on them will necessarily have to bill you more for his work. He's really hoping that you'll focus on the top search engine rankings without noticing how many links he's paid for. Beware of the professional who only shows you his company's site, and do some of your own research to discover how many keywords his company ranks for. If it's only a few keywords, find someone else.

3. Who's Working For You? A lot of US-based SEO companies hire out their work overseas where labor is significantly cheaper. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but it ultimately means that you might have a hard time monitoring the work that they're doing for you. Another drawback is that overseas SEO work utilizes techniques that can get your site banned from Google.

4. Meet Your Professional Face-to-Face. It is sometimes the case that an SEO professional will use lots of technical jargon that may confuse you more than help you. But there's no reason you shouldn't expect an SEO professional to be able to talk about exactly what he does and how he does it in terms that a layperson can understand. He should welcome your questions and be willing to take the time to answer them. If the SEO professional isn't patient with you and your questions, move on.

5. Be Suspicious. Any SEO professional who guarantees you a #1 Google ranking should be shown the door immediately. Only Google decides who receives a #1 ranking, and anyone who says that they can obtain it for you is lying. Your professional can only control a few of the factors that influence Google rank. Instead of finding a professional who wants to guarantee something, find one with years of experience and plenty of expertise who will give his best effort to improving your search engine rankings.

6. Leave the Black Hat Alone. Black Hat SEO describes any SEO techniques that are looked upon unfavorably by search engines. They typically try to force search engines to give high rankings to websites that typically wouldn't get high rankings. While some black hat techniques may work in the short term, they almost never work in the long term, and can even get your site banned from Google.

There is not doubt that SEO should be an integral part of your overall internet marketing technique. If you choose to hire a professional to help you with this, make sure you're hiring someone you can trust who will get results for you. Research them thoroughly before making a hire, and make sure you talk to the actual person or people who will be doing the work for you. Hiring the right person can be the difference between success and failure, so get it right the first time!