Therapy recommendations?

[the_andy]

So, I'm finally going to try to start seeing someone about my anxiety. Anyone have good advice to share on how to go about finding a therapist? The usual recommendation is to talk to friends and family for their recommendations, but most of my local friends are only sort of local and their recommendations would likely fall outside my comfortable travel radius (I'm not renting a car for every session, at least not during the initial feeling out period). I'll still check with the couple people I know in the city, but I'm probably going to have to go into this cold. The good news at least is that my preliminary search shows that there are a lot of therapists in my general area, so at least I'll have plenty of options even with my limited travel ability.

So, I'm interested in things like: what do I look for, what questions should I be asking, what are warning signs I should run away from, etc. Or any other advice, since this is all new to me. I mean, my usual method to finding a doctor in general is to just ask who has the first opening in their schedule, but this, I think, probably should involve more careful thought.