Furthermore, I'm sure you've heard about websites getting banned after hiring a SEO expert. I had this experience:

I remember reading about a well known SEO business and I wrote them an email inquiring about why they didn't appear in search results dealing with their subject matter: search engine optimization or search engine ranking. I received a short and cryptic reply that didn't say much.

As time went by, I came onto an article that stated particular SEO outfit had been banned by SE's during that time frame. That explains nature of return email; meaning: I don't want to talk about it!

The paragraph above implies that if they'll do it to their own website, they'll do it to yours! Look before you leap should more than suffice as motto for your business decision.

I think SEO experts that are on level won't guarantee you dominance for ANY keyword phrase. Think about your competition and see if it's feasible. For example, would you have resources to dominate for word "business?" I did a search on Google and came up with 695,000,000 results!

Before you make a decision and commit time and money, check out any offer. Phone past customers and ask them about their experiences; would they hire same expert again? Ask for quantifiable results and look for a positive track record; I imagine SEO experts are not a dime a dozen. Investigate and get answers to all your questions before you put money on table.

(C)2005 Francisco Aloy

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If you're working to increase your link popularity through reciprocal links and refuse to link to web sites that are lower than PR 5, rethink your strategy. Well-designed, well-ranked sites with informative content are always a safe bet to link out to. That was my basic strategy with a client of mine, www.1bbweb.com.

They have a PageRank 4 (at time of writing this article, January 2005) and rank at #6 on Google for 'bed and breakfast directory' (without quotes). The #7 result has a PR 6 and next three spots in first page of results are PR 5 web sites, all higher than my client. This example is repeated throughout Web and proves that preoccupying yourself with PageRank can result in losing sight of more important ranking factors.