2) They rely on links to your page from other web pages: This is understandable, since if search engines relied only on web page copy, it would be too easy to manipulate results. Outside inbound links from quality sites are difficult to get, and therefore carry significant weight. Regarding inbound links, two things are important:

a) quality and topic of page where link originates should be relevant to your topic, and

b) words on text used to link to you must contain your preferred keywords: if those links say "Dallas Web Design Company", search engines will conclude that you are a web design company based in Dallas (by same token, words "click here" won't tell search engines anything about your site).

In a nutshell, find right keywords, make your page copy relevant to those keywords, and get a lot of quality inbound links with your keywords in link text, and you will be on your way to high search engine rankings.

For more tips on internet marketing and search engine optimization, you can visit my site at http://www.theinternetdigest.net, read my article "Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization" at http://www.accordmarketing.com/tid/archive/diy-search-engine-optimization.html or check out SEOBook at http://www.accordmarketing.com/seobook/

You will be forced to pay monthly maintenance to that company and if you decide to stop their services, they will redirect their traffic to some other company in same industry. Keywords which worked well for you, will work well for your competitors too.

Fair and honest company might offer similar deal because of many reasons, but domain from which visitors will come will be YOURS, so if you want to change SEO Company, you will have traffic directed to your site until new company takes over, and your investment (optimized domain and traffic) will remain your property.

In case that SEO Company doesn’t want to disclose techniques which will use to rank high your website.

Why?

Legal and ethical SEO Company will give you very clear idea what they intent to do with your site, and will give you detailed plan of activities. You have to know that some SEO Companies use techniques forbidden by search engines and your site may get banned from search engines because of this.

For example if your SEO company use thousands automatically created so called doorway pages, which are full of your keywords only and are useless to visitors, your site might get banned because of this.

So be sure to ask your SEO Company what they intent to do, and which techniques they plan to use. Good SEO Company is always ready to educate their client to some level.

When SEO Company claim that you will see results within 1 months

Why?

In this case, don’t walk away. Run!

If your site is brand new, it might take up to 3 months to get listed on major search engines. To get some results even in less competitive results, you should count that 4-6 months is timeframe where you can expect to see first results. Note that if your website has 5-10 pages only, you will need much more content that this. SEO Company will have to add much new pages to your site, and that is time consuming task.

So, if SEO Company claims that you will be on top within a month, they have PPC (Pay per Click) in their mind, and that have nothing with Search Engine Optimization.