What would be good questions to ask an SEO Company?

Paul,

The techniques are transparent and if they are using "secret" techniques, I would suspect they are using "black hat" techniques that can actually hurt you.

A competent SEO company will interview YOU about your business, your competitors, and the search phrase(s) you want to optimize.

They will study your web site and make recommendations on basic structure such as page titles, meta tags (keywords/description), header tag content, and keywords density in your content. They should also discuss robots.txt to shape the indexing of your site.

You should ask them:

1. How long have you been doing this?
2. What are some of your successful campaigns?
3. Can you provide references?
4. What techniques do you use? (if anything sounds fishy, move on to the next candidate company)

If they GUARANTEE specific results, I would be very suspicious.

Remember that you are best off targeting specific phrases and geographic locations. If you are trying to get top listing in "Web Hosting" or "Web Design" - lotsa luck!

Ask them which end of the spectrum do they fit; white hat or black hat seo and explain why they fit there.

Ask them how they feel about buying and selling links.

If they tell you they guarantee #1 rankings, find someone else who will be more honest and straight forward with you.

Yes, never believe a company that tells you "We can guarantee..."

WHY?

This is because they cannot really guarantee anything, unless they are using dirty tricks which will harm your website later on in time.

It is surprising, just how easy SEO is. I do it all the time; i have more issues with my design than i do with SEO.

I would ask how they guarantee, and also just about the buying and selling of links, because Google can have issues with that.

~ Mike

Here's a good article from SEOmoz:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-choose-the-right-seo-vendor

I'd just probably ask what their website is and what keywords they rank for. If they rank on top of their keyword, they could probably do the job

I would probably ask them whether they maintain transparency throughout there SEO process.
Its very important know what SEO guy is doing. After all customer is the person who will suffer for mistake done by SEO.

I will ask only one question that how many days my website will getting top?

{links removed}

Just ask them did they follow Google webmasters guidelines to promote website.
If they follow Google then the company is ok. Also check their previous feedbacks by other client

ask them for their experience in this work and ask them refrence of website on which they have worked

there is no good question, i don't like question...

Their experience, results & clients.etc you can ask...

I will ask first that

"When SEO work developed ?
Who is the first SEO EXPERT?
In which country it was developed first?
Please give answer.
I give my tender of thanks for giving these answers.
Awesome thanks in advance.