oddsod - 2:02 pm on Mar 24, 2005 (gmt 0)

I really don't see too many of these comments helping the poster.... "read WebmasterWorld" is not helpful. Need a plumber? Learn to do plumbing. No.

To be fair the general user of webmasterworld isn't experienced in outsourcing SEO; his perspective likely is: It's easy, do it yourself, we'll help you.

I can understand the poster's concern. Most business owners don't have the time to keep abreast with the latest in SEO, Google updates, and market changes like nofollow tags. And they probably don't have the inclination either.

Your suggestions about getting references etc are sound ideas. May I suggest that the real SEOs put together a list of questions that a competent SEO would know the answers to. That way other prospective SEO hunters would know what to ask. Users would have to integrate them into the conversation or openly say you are testing their knowledge. Sample questions

1. Have you read the thread in webmasterworld about questions to ask an SEO :). If the answer is "no"...
2. I seem to have lost hundreds of links. I exchanged links with 2000 sites but when I do a link:htt*://www.mysite.com in Google I see only 20 incoming links. What's happened? (Ans: Google's link report has been wonky for a long time, don't trust it)
3. What's the different between cloaking for a user and for IPs? Do you do that (also gives you an idea of the type of approaches they use)?
4. How many SEs will you automatically submit me to (trick question to see if they try to impress you with big numbers. A good answer for me would be "no automatic submissions").
5. What are freshbot and deepbot?

Maybe you SEO companies can come up with some....