A question from West Virginia, right next to my home state Kentucky. Frank asks: “If I'm looking to hire an SEO agency, which one do you recommend?”.
I'm not going to say which SEO agency I personally would recommend because you never know. Things can change, people change their policies, you never know exactly what different agencies might be doing. I'll give you a general answer to the question. If you search for [Google SEO guidelines] or something like that, we have an entire page on our Webmaster Help Center that sort of says “here's some things to look out for” and “here are some things to look for in an SEO”.
So things like references, they should be able to tell you exactly what they are going to do, like if they are going to wave some magic smoke and not tell you what they're doing, be a little worried about that. You might find what they say boring but they should be very transparent about what they are doing. “Oh I'm going to change the site architecture, I'm going to do all this”. They should be completely up front about all those sorts of things.
We've changed our SEO guidelines, so they used to be a little more controversial. Now they are much more focused on “here are some great ways to identify them”, so it is a really good page and I recommend that you just check it out.
There are lots of great SEOs out there. If an SEO gives you sort of a queasy feeling or they seem a little shady or fly by night, there are lots of SEOs out there and so don't go with anybody where you're worried that you can't leave them or you just get a bad feeling from them because there are lots of good SEOs out there.