Hiring an SEO consultant

Several clients have recently asked our opinion about hiring a third party SEO to help improve the visibility of their website.

Over the past 6+ years I’ve used many different third party SEO’s and the results have almost always been extremely disappointing (and expensive). Whilst there are undoubtedly excellent consultants and agencies out there it’s almost impossible to differentiate between those that will generate great results and those that will just burn through your cash.

In my experience SEO agencies are typically looking for between £500 and £1,500 per month to manage your SEO campaign. When put in the context of your overall technology spending this is a huge investment. What is more, your can easily perform a huge amount of this work directly for yourself as this post confirms:

http://www.promo-ho.com/2008/06/seo-guide-for-rest-of-us.html

This advice is fairly straightforward but it’s still a useful starting point for those tackling the same issues. The key things that I would highlight are the need for quality inbound links and original content (please see my earlier post - Original text is the best SEO technique you aren’t currently using)

For their part, the Big G has also published the following advice on the matter which provides plenty of sound advice to help prevent you being ripped off:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35291