Friend looking an SEO person/company - any recommendations?

[Rikki]

Hey folks,

I know SEO is half common sense and half black magic so was wondering if anyone could recommend a place or person who could help a friend out with their new website as it seems to have been designed without much SEO thought (not even simple meta tags in there).

Many thanks,

Rik

[TechnoBear]

I'm not sure you'll get much by way of helpful replies to that (although I've been wrong before ). What you might want to think about is requesting a review of the site from an SEO perspective. You can do that in the Reviews & Critiques forum, in accordance with its guidelines.

[benbob]

This day and age, if the site does not contain lots of unique/original useful content, no amount of seo will get it in the top 100 of organic serp, let alone first 3. Inversely, a site with 234 highly informative pages that are all topical, will stand a very good chance of appearing on page one without spending a second's thought on seo.

[Tajul2010]

I think you should hire some seo experts who know both on-page optimization and off-page optimization. For getting seo expert, you can search in outsourcing job site such as odesk, elance and so on. Or you can post your job in that site with your all requirements, then the experts will bid for the job as well as show you their previous task.

[ULTiMATE]

What size is the business?

I ask because the needs of a large business and a small website are two entirely different things. I've worked with quite a few large clients and in general SEO is mainly an on-page affair, where things like UX and IA have their own dedicated roles. If you've got the cash for that kind of thing I'd recommend getting a UX designer in to look at the site and recommend changes.

If it's a small site that needs looking at then my best recommendation is always a local SEO guy. Ask some local businesses who they've used and if they can recommend them based on real evidence of success.

[instantsitez]

You can try odesk. Post a job and you should receive many applicants. Then you can go through them and read their reviews and past experience. Ask them to provide you their past work, check these sites and keywords on google and see if they work.

[Elena_S]

If you decide to go with Odesk, be careful there some because employees may try to scam you, so pick only those whose who have several positive reviews. And pick the job start date around one-two weeks from the job posting date to give yourself enough time to interview your candidates and to choose one carefully.

[alabamaseo]

If you choose to outsource your SEO somewhere like oDesk, make sure you find someone who speaks good English. The most important aspect of SEO is finding a team of good writers who can crank out unique content that people actually want to read. You should then use these articles to place on your blog (or some other consistent content source on your site) and to place on other industry-related blogs as guest posts in exchange for a link (the only backlinks truly worth going after anymore).

The biggest problem that many SEO's face is that try to trick Google. Google's algorithm has now become so advanced, that they have pretty much stopped the positive effects of mass linkbuilding. It is better to have 5 good guest post links and a consistent content source than to have 50,000 links from blog comments, spun articles in article directories, web directories, link exchanges, web 2.0's, etc.

At the end of the day, all Google wants is to give their users the best possible information to match what they are looking for. If Google consistently produced bad results, people would stop using their search features. As long as you focus on giving Google what they want, they will reward you.