Tips when selecting an SEO:

• Always check testimonials. Ranking results should be displayed in a format where they can be checked by simply clicking on the keyword. If not, copy and paste into Google and look for the associated domain name. Go to the website concerned and ensure that the SEO or web design company is the one that is providing the optimisation. This is generally situated on the clients website footer.
• Try to avoid companies who optimise a minimum amount of keywords for the home page only ( usually about 4 ), promise no guarantees and charge a fortune. These companies may or not be on page 1 or 2 on the search engines. For companies that do provide testimonials and ranking results. Consider their services but be aware that this will not necessarily benefit the whole of the website.
• Avoid companies that do not provide testimonials or existing client ranking results.
• Just because a company is on page one of Google under 'search engine optimisation' does not mean to say they will obtain the same results for your website. In some cases this is a common, aggressive and misleading sales pitch. Ensure you know what you are paying for. A few of our clients have been duped by this scheme and were quoted anything from a one time fee of £3800 or £1,000 per month. SEO companies must provide testimonials and client ranking results in order for you to make a fair judgement of their services.
• Avoid companies who use sponsored links to promote organic SEO. UNLESS! They provide testimonials and good ranking results for genuine clients. There is nothing wrong with this. It maybe that they are too busy looking after clients interests.
• When contacting a search engine optimisation company, ask if they optimise and prepare the whole website and if not why not ? Listen for background noise and if it is awash with a room full of sales people - whatever they say get it confirmed in writing.
• Avoid the heavy sales pitch. Generally easily spotted by the above, an avoidance of answering direct questions or a repetitive sales pitch, but we are on page 1 position.
• Be wary of receiving emails that claim top rankings when accompanied with a free website appraisal or one which states, your website traffic can be improved. Most of these are automated and the company does not even go anywhere near your website. We get these all the time and when challenged one company bragged how they had over 10,000 clients... and the email was a good way of getting new clients, but admitted they had not  even visited the site, offered no guarantees, no example rankings... just misleading promises, prices started from £750 and the client was then invoiced six months later irrespective of ranking positions. Generally a minimum amount of work was applied to the site. 

The moral of the story is:

• Try to use an approved search engine optimisation company that specialises in whole website optimisation, provides 100% search engine website architecture, all URLs are 100% search engine friendly and one that provides back links to deep pages as well as the home page as part of their seo package. This is very important for ecommerce shopping carts if all products are going to attract page 1 & page 2 listings.
• Only use companies that provide testimonials and case study ranking results. Please be aware that these may fluctuate between page results as new websites are introduced to the INTERNET or algorithm changes by the search engines. Generally speaking these should only be +- one page max.
• There should be more than one case study result per domain.
• There are some excellent SEO companies who provide such services.
• It's then a matter of trying to find a company that matches your budget but which also provides a real opportunity of getting your website on page 1 or page 2, but also generates targeted traffic relevant to all products or services.
• To obtain the best results for your website, the website architecture should be 100% search engine compliant before any optimisation is considered. If not, then you are not getting true value for money.