What will you ask a SEO firm

There is a discussion going on highrankings forum about questions that needs to be asked to a SEO firm . People keep asking this questions and i have already covered about this in my previous postings here. The SEO thread starter asks what is the best question to be asked.

Well there are 1000s of SEOs who call them companies, 1000s of SEO teams who call them companies. So what makes a good SEO company well first research what is the expertise of the company how many employees they have, how many work full time in SEO etc.

Here are some valid questions you can ask.

1. What is the most competitive keyword your company has ranked and how long it has stayed or is staying in Google top 10 rankings?
2. Can you explain some of the methods you use to gain ranking for our sites, is there something against search engine guidelines?
3. Give us some of your clients who are doing great in search engines, getting maximum traffic with good ROI and is with you for more than 2 years?
4. What is your client retention rate and success rate in search engine rankings?
5. What is success when it comes to search rankings?

I can imagine more but these will be on my top priority list

subdomain or own domain blogs which one is better?

Many have questions whether sub domain blogs on blog service providers or blogs hosted on www yourdomain com is better.

As an expert in this first for more than 5 years ill tell you both don’t have any difference. whether its *.blogspot.com , *.blogsome.com or *.wordpress.com there are no visible differences. As long as your blog has good back links and the feed URLs are facilitated to ping regularly your blog will be indexed regularly. Use some blog software like feedburner which helps in automated pinging from Google blog search and other blog searches. If you are into Google blog search you can be sure of that you will be included into Google search results too. Search Engines love fresh contents make sure you provide the crawlers as much fresh contents as possible.

I recommend you submit your feed URL to Google Blog ping service http://blogsearch.google.com/ping I am sure it will help,

Matt cutts on web spam in recent web 2.0 Conference Oreilly

Here you can find some tips about combating spam from Google’s Matt Cutts head of Google’s Webspam team and an engineer who’s been working on the problem for eight years. During a speech at the Web 2.0 Expo Matt Cutts explained about countering Web spam as-

“Spammers are human,” Cutts said. “You have the power to raise their blood
pressure. Make them spend more time and effort…If spammer gets frustrated,
he’s more likely to look for someone easier.” How? Forthwith, some tips for
those who manage their own or others’ Web sites. • Use captcha systems to make
sure real people, not bots, are commenting on your site. He uses a simple math
puzzle–what’s 2 + 2?–but he also likes KittenAuth, which makes people identify
kitten photos. One blogger merely requires people to type the word “orange” into
a field. “The vast majority of bots will never do that,” Cutts said. •
Reconfigure software settings after you’ve installed it. A little modification
of various settings will throw bots off the scent. “If you can off the beaten
path, away from default software installations, you’ll save yourself a ton of
grief,” he said. • Employ systems that rank people by trust and reputation. For
example, eBay shows how long a person has been a member and how satisfied others
are with transactions with that person. • Don’t be afraid of legitimate
purveyors of search-engine optimization services. “SEO is not spam. Google does
not hate SEO,” Cutts said. “There are plenty of white-hat SEO (companies) who
can help you out.” Registering your Web site at Google’s Webmaster Central site
can help find bogus search-engine optimization tricks others may use on your
site, such as keywords written in white text on white backgrounds, he added.

Speech by Matt Cutts was very information he did say white hat SEO companies are definitely recommended and its not difficult to find a good SEO company. He recommends comment authentication since there are a lot of blog spam lurking out there. Mattcutts has been a major link between webmasters and Google.

Higher traffic from Yahoo after latest yahoo update.

We are experiencing quite a significant amount of increase in traffic from yahoo search engine after yahoo made an update before 10 days. Yahoo Search Engine recently updated their algorithm and this made lot of sites shuffle in their rankings. Some sites lost rankings some gained we gained very good ranking for our site and now yahoo accounts for about 15% compared to Google. We probably got good boost in Yahoo Search Rankings. We used to get only 3 or 4% of traffic from Yahoo now it has increased significantly

We are happy that yahoo still have a good market share in search

Slow Crawling experienced by few webmasterworld members

Some webmasterworld members have reported slow crawling from Googlebot on their sites. When you check this thread you can see that many have posted data showing slow browsing from Googlebot. From the sites we monitor we don’t see much changes to Googlebot crawling some of the sites which are actively updated Googlebot is regular in gobbling up pages. Some sites which are not updated often see a bit lesser browsing other than that things look very normal to me.
I probably feel this could be caused by drop in backlinks to sites or Google devaluing some links. Google is very active in devaluing links recently. I recommend webmasters to keep a check on their backlinks and see if they are devalued.