Beware of promised first place rankings in Google - especially on very competitive keywords that have high monthly search volume.

If you are given promises of guaranteed position, I have a few comments. Number one, nothing is forever. Number two, if they can achieve a top ranking for a particular keyword, that keyword may likely be not very useful to your business since only a few people would actually be searching on that term in any given month. Thirdly, if the keyword or phrase is very popular -has lots of search volume per month - they may be telling an untruth, knowingly or unknowingly. Fourthly, they may be able to deliver on the promise of high placement, but may use blackhat - or bad-webmaster - bad, bad-webmaster techniques to accomplish it, jeopardizing your site’s existence within Google and other search engines entirely. (if this does happen to you, you can try to undo this process... but why go down this path? Just Google "Banned from Google index".)