SEO companies help ?

I have been interviewing SEO companies to run SEO for my new site. Can anyone give me some good interview questions to ask a potential SEO candidate?

I do my own SEO so I'm not sure what to ask but I would have someone look to see if those people are actually doing SEO on their own sites. It's funny how many people I see offer the service of SEO but they don't even have their site search engine optimized. I just roll my eyes.

Thanks Angie. Could you give me some of the components of SEO I should ask for. How do I monitor SEO progress after I select a company?

You need to be clear about the keywords that you want to rank for. So either you need to do the keyword research or they do. You will need to know where you rank now for those keywords so that you will be able to track your progress. I would be wary of anyone talking about getting thousands of backlinks in a short period of time. Most of those links may not be relevant and your site may be associated with spamming strategies.

Thanks everyone. I am confused on the actual components of SEO. I know of blogging and back links. What are the other areas of SEO I need to address?

Maybe Lynn's section on SEO on her blog would help give you some ideas. Here's a good post of hers about how to optimize your site. And here was a guest post on Lynn's blog about ways to track your SEO progress.

Hopefully these will help guide you in the right direction!

I agree with Angie - first study up on SEO. Lynn's posts are a good place to start, and I believe she still recommends SEO Fast Start, a free eBook on the subject.

I'd be very careful if I were you about hiring an SEO company, especially since you admit you don't know much about it. There are a lot of scammers out there calling themselves SEO experts, and if you don't know what you're doing, it's easy to get taken in by their claims.

SEO Fast Start is a great start and the first book I read that really helped me feel like I was learning a little about SEO. I do my own SEO and if I don't know anything about it I can see where as Cindy says it could be easy to be taken. Once you learn a little or a lot about SEO you will understand what you expect to get from someone else doing you SEO work.

I agree with the others: read SEO Fast Start first.

Blogging is not a component of SEO :) Keyword research, coding, linking and copy/content. So, the content that makes up a sales page or an individual blog post would be content, but that part of SEO is not exclusive to blogging. Copy and/or content are also found on home pages of business-to-business websites, ecommerce product descriptions, etc., etc.

But do get Dan's SEO Fast Start ebook. You have to at least be able to talk about SEO semi-intelligently or you'll have no idea if the company is legit or not.

Also, one note on ranking reports: they are semi-useless :) The ranking that appears on your computer (on Google especially) can show VERY differently for me than it does for you. Why? Several reasons. (1) Search engines have numerous datacenters all across the country. Each may show slightly different results. (2) If you have personal search turned on (if you log into Gmail, YouTube, Google Analytics, etc. it turns on automatically) will show radically different results between computers. So, if your SEO company is in California and you're in New York and they don't have personalized search turned on and you do, you'll both see completely different rankings.

Thank you all for your help and comments. Do I need to rewrite the content of each page on my site to include key words and phrases? Most of my product section is technical information on each one of my products.

Your copy needs to include keyphrases, yes. But many SEO companies have copywriters on staff that will rewrite your copy. What you DON'T want to do is put too much focus on the search engines. If you don't know how to write SEO copy, I'd suggest you learn. The primary focus is your customers: not the engines. No search engine has ever whipped out a credit card and bought anything from a website. Your customers are the only ones that can do that. If you get too caught up with search engine optimization when writing, it can ruin your message. SEO companies are famous for stuffing far too many keywords into copy to optimize it. They kill the flow and the copy's appeal to human beings.