1. Check out their experience. You shouldn't have to try hard to find samples of their clients or their SEO performance on individual websites. How competitive are their search terms that are ranking well on Google? Are search terms that are ranking well difficult terms to position--one, two and three word phrases, or are they easy terms to position because no one else is using them at all--six, seven and eight word terms?

2. Ask for testimonial letters. Insist on letterheads from clients that feature real names, not Fred from Cleveland or J.T. from New York. Call these references and ask them questions about SEO performance of company you are considering.

3. Ask them to document their process. What policies and procedures do they follow? Are they consistent? Do they stay away from unethical procedures that could put your site in jeopardy with search engines?

4. Get staff credentials. Find out who is doing work. You really need a team of people - no one person can be proficient in every area of server administration, programming, marketing, writing, link building and more. Get to know team a bit.

Google's Adsense is one of most powerful weapons in website publisher's arsenal. It enables you to monetize your sites easily and if used properly can generate a very healthy income. However, if you're not using it properly and maximizing income you squeeze from it, your leaving money on table – something we all hate doing.

Boosting your return from Adsense can be done very easily and quickly, and you'll be amazed by results.

I ran Adsense on my sites for over a year before I discovered these techniques, and like many people, I though I was doing pretty well. My clickthrough rates and CPM figures were very healthy, and I didn't honestly think that they could be improved a great deal. How wrong I was. Immediately after I implemented a few quick changes my clickthrough rate more than doubled, and by doing some fine tuning I manged to get nearly three times as many people to click on ads as had been previously doing so.

The first technique is one that was 'discovered' by amazingly helpful Debs, on SIteSell's SBI! forums. When I read it originally, it made sense and I decided to goive it a go, but I wasn't prepared for immediate impact it would have on my income. It involves making only a few simple changes to format and positioning of your Adsense ads.

Firstly, forget about using banners or skyscrapers. These ad formats are almost universally ignored by surfers. Why? Because we've all been conditioned to recognise a skyscraper or banner as an advert and as these adverts are rarely of any interest, we ignore them. What's needed is a way of integrating Adsense ads into editorial on your site as seamlessly as possible. To do this you need to do three things:

1. Use 250 x 250 rectangle format 2. Make background color of ad same as background color of your site, or as close to it as possible. 3. Make ads borderless by setting border color to be same as background color of ad.

These changes can be made by logging into your Adsense account and creating a custom format. Just select 250 x 250 ad format, and create a custom color palette. Use color picker to pick coor you want. The Javascript is automatically generated at foot of page, ready for you to copy and paste into pages on your site.