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Yes - his website homepage has a short excerpt on SEO, so I'm assuming he has a working knowledge of it.

I agree with you that the designs presented are much more appealing than your current design.  While your current site is outdated and has a "responsive" (sort of...) design, there is a lot of room for improvement.

It looks like he is an experienced designer that has a working knowledge of SEO, which is really important when considering developing or designing a new site.  URL structures, page layout, and usability all play into SEO.

As far as what design to go with, you'll probably want to sit down with your management team and first determine the following:

1. Who is using your site?
2. Why are they using it?
3. What are potentials users looking for?
4. What are we offering potential users?

After defining these answers (you probably already have done this), you'll have a better idea of what type of design you want, what type of call-to-action's you'll have, the layout and structure, etc., etc.

I would suggest using URLs without file extensions.  It's cleaner, and easier for users to remember.

Because http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs is essentially http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs/index.html (if you don't use Apache to manipulate URLs), you'll need to have a redirect set up to avoid losing any visitor flow and incoming link juice.  If you run an Apache web server, you'll want to do this in .htaccess.

As Chris stated above, it does look like a Google Penguin hit.

First plan of action would be to log into Google Webmaster Tools and see if you have any notifications from Google regarding manual penalties.  If so, take the necessary steps to resolve these issues.

Second, it does look like you have some really spammy links coming in from spammy sources. I ran an OpenSiteExplorer report on your page and I see the same "cialis" links that Chris alluded to above.  You may want to look at disavowing links like these to make your inbound link profile look more organic.

And finally - update your site!  If you had somehow managed to make it through Penguin 2.0, you would have eventually lost your rankings anyways because other sites will be coming in and taking advantage of absence.

Hope this helps!

I'll look at the page from a technical standpoint.  You may or may not have the ability, resources or time to make these improvements, but here are my thoughts:

• There are too many HTTP requests being made (83 I think) and the page load time suffers (for me between 3 and 12 seconds).  Looks like lots of Javascript files that may not necessarily be used on this particular page.  The scripts are pretty small in size, and your images seem to all be optimized for the web also - so that's good.
• You have rel="nofollow" on your own top navigation bar (My Account, My Cart, etc) and in other parts of the page.  Is there a reason for this?
• Images don't have alt text.  This would definitely give you a boost in image search.
• Responsive Design is missing.  Not sure how important it is to your target customer base, but it's becoming increasingly important.

Listings like Yelp have continued to increase their traction in SERPs in the past few years.  Yelp is a very trusted source of information, especially on a local scale.  Broad-match keywords like "local diners" will most likely give you Yelp or Google Places results, as opposed to individual websites.

When considering SEO, most people will focus their efforts on driving organic search traffic to their site.  Really though, we should consider our online reputation as a whole.  If you get a customer to walk in your front door, does it really matter if they found your webpage, or if they found you on Yelp or FourSquare?  As marketers, our ultimate goal is to generate leads and convert them to sales - it does not matter how we reach the end result.

So in short - you shouldn't be alarmed by this, and shouldn't even feel threatened by it.  Use these platforms to manage your online reputation, receive feedback, and engage your potential customers.

The number of categories you have on your WordPress blog should accurately reflect the content you write about.  If you have a legitimate need for 50 categories, then by all means, 50 categories it is.  If your content all falls under 5 categories, then that is all you should need.

Essentially, let your content dictate how many categories your blog has.  Remember to look out for duplicate content, or pages with little to no content.  It's possible that you have a single blog post that is tagged to two categories - and those categories have no other posts attributed to them.  The category pages will then show short excerpts of the content (little to no content), and be essentially identical because the same post is tied to them (duplicate content).