Is search engine optimization really worth it for my business? This is the question that so many business owners have been asking themselves after receiving that sales pitch over the phone or in person.

There are several thing that you should find out before hiring anybody to handle the search engine optimization for your company’s website. Whether or not you decide to listen to these could be the difference between your site becoming highly profitable and getting banned from search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Just do a quick search for seo horror stories and you can get an idea of what choosing the wrong company can do to your website.

5 questions to ask before hiring an SEO Company

1. “Do you have any current examples of a website that you’ve ranked in the search engines, and if so what are the keywords they are ranking for?” You should always look into this if they give you examples and even call one of these current or previous customers to see if they had a good experience with the company. If the person has no examples to show you, I would be pretty hesitant on letting them practice with your company’s website.

2. “What can you do to make my website better?” A good website should catch visitor’s attention without having to scroll down the page, and should also include a call to action that encourages visitor’s to either buy your product or sign up for a service that you offer. In internet marketing industry this is often referred to as keeping it above the fold.

3. “How do you plan on building backlinks?” Backlinks are an important part of SEO because if done the wrong way, it can get your website banned from search engines or directories. There are lots of good backlinking techniques that can be used to establish popularity, just make sure that it’s done in an ethical way.

4. “Are people really searching online for my product or services?” There are research tools available that can determine how many searches are performed on a specific keyword. This data can be used to see how many people are using words related to your business when searching on the internet.

5. “Do you guarantee my site will rank #1 on Google?” This is sort of a trick question because a good SEO company will usually tell you no. The reason is because this cannot be guaranteed unless you are actually one of Google’s engineers, and even if so they could not even give you a guarantee. The only thing that should be guaranteed is quality of work performed by the SEO company in question.

If the company in question can answer these questions for you correctly there is a good chance they at least have basic knowledge of search engine optimization. These are some very simple questions and if they cannot be answered to your satisfaction I would recommend looking for a different company to handle your SEO.

If you want to learn about search engine optimization and other internet marketing techniques there are tons websites that you can get some great information for free. I learned most of what I know at the Wealthy Affiliate University and SEOmoz