Hi Black Knight,
I do agree you need to check out the company that you are going to be working with. But there are also some small companies that are just getting started and can do just as good of a job as the big ones.
My site is only 7 months old. I read and learn something new everyday. I'm in Colombia S.A and because it would be almost impossible to design websites locally I knew my business had to come from on line. I started reading and learning about search engines the same day we started our business. We got ranked in the top 20 of the search engines almost the first month. I worked 20 hours a day then and still do know. I never planed to do
SEO work but it seemed I was helping a lot of people on there sites for free. The only way to stop this was to start giving prices for it because it is hard to get business for your own site when your trying to help everyone else with there's.
We now offer
SEO work. If I can not get a site in the top 20 I will give you a 100% refund. Also because I have been doing this for only about one month in order to get customers we have to do it a lot cheaper then I would like. Until we get several customers to the top of the search engines. Then we will charge what everyone else charges.
I would never risk my reputation or business by not taking care of the customer.
So in reality it is also a good deal for the business owner that I work with because I'm a new business and do not have the customer I can show him from 6 months or a year ago.
I think it is important to find out how much and how hard a business is willing to work for you.