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.

Best approach to do find right keywords and key phrases is to get your generic keyword, and add a specific word to it. Using this approach you will be able to find yours most important key phrases, and target your traffic much better. Key phrases are usually two to five words long.

Think global

In different countries people use different terminology for same product or service. Be sure that you check your terminology for your main keywords. Different terminology for your keyword might be used in Canada, or in Australia. Follow your site statistic, and if some country is missing, something might be wrong with your terminology.

How many keywords do you need

Number of key phrases for which you will optimize your pages will depend from your budget of course. But be sure to create long list to select from. Initial keyword research should end with at least 70 -100 keywords or key phrases.

Your first thought here might be how you will find so many keywords. Creativity and well knowing your industry will do half of work. The tools will do other half. Wordtracker has free trial which will tell you how many times key phrase was searched for last month. Full version (you can pay for one day only if you want to use this tool once) is much more powerful tool of course. Overture has also free tool for keyword research which will give you useful suggestions. These tools will give you suggestions which you might not come to your mind, and tell you how many competitors you have for every keyword.

Next phase should be customizing some of these suggestions and make re-check after that. After establishing main list, start elimination. Have in mind that your chances are bigger if you select bigger number of keywords. It is always best strategy to optimize each page for one primary and one secondary keyword. Optimize your main page for your most important key phrase.

Final selection will depend from your budget. You can always optimize more pages later, so keep initial keyword list. Best option is to start to optimize your pages for less competitive key phrases first. When you achieve high ranking for these key phrases, then go after more competitive key phrases.