Paying someone else to do SEO

[Cloughie]

Hey everyone,

I am just curious to know if anyone else has paid for someone else to do their SEO?

Heres my problem, as is probably the same for all you lot, I am a pretty busy guy.

I work a full time job which see´s me doing about 50 hours a week normally and I run 1 content site, 1 forums and an ecommerce store. I sometimes like to have a bit of a life too

Now, I know what things need doing on my site in terms of SEO, however I have 2 main problems.

1. I have limited time to spend doing them as SEO can often take a bunch of time

2. My knowledge is pretty good, though no where near as good as someone that specialises in the field.

So, I was thinking about paying someone a monthly fee to do SEO work on my sites.

Backlink generating, meta tag tidying, page optimisation etc. etc.

What does everyone think?

Have you ever paid someone to do your SEO before?

Or, do you actually charge for SEO and can yougive me smoe advice?

The other option I am considering is paying someone a good amount to do a one off analysis of my sites and to write a comprehensive report on what areas to spend time in and then me just doing that. That saves my time in terms of trying to work out what needs to be done, allows me to be focused in it and also saves me some money.

Help

Thanks in advance.

Daniel

[Chris]

Well, the largest time drain for SEO Work is backlink building, so if you were to outsource anything I'd outsource that. However you need to be sure you hire someone with ethics since:

1. They're be talking to third parties as a representative of your site. If they spam you could get in trouble.

2. There is no way to verify their work really, they could always claim they did submissions but no actual links were given.

Personally I'd like to hire someone for this job as well, but overcoming these two things is stopping me.

[Cloughie]

I hear you Chris and I agree on your points...

Its also a little overwhelming knowing theres a whole bunch of optimisation thats needed to be done and I would prefer to get it done sooner than later.

Plus... link building is boring...

I think the option of having someone do a whole site review and then me doing the work is probably the best idea. That means that I can get some of the best advice and a clear plan to follow and then I can put in the hard work to make it happen.

The most overwhelming thing for me is that I don´t know exactly what to do and more imoprtantly exactly where my site could be improved.

Do you know anyone reliable who would do perhaps a full site review and provide comprehensive analysis of how well it is currently optimised and what could be done to improve SEO?

Thanks for the help

Daniel

[Cutter]

Do you have a few thousand dollars to spend?

[Emancipator]

Cloughie as Chris rightly pointed out the problem with SEO is you never know when your going to get royally ****ed. My suggestion is build base traffic with MSN which can be done by any idiot. NO im not calling you an idiot, just making the point .

[vahsi000]

Cloughie as Chris rightly pointed out the problem with SEO is you never know when your going to get royally ****ed. My suggestion is build base traffic with MSN which can be done by any idiot. NO im not calling you an idiot, just making the point .

Any idiot?

idiot = "A person of profound mental retardation having a mental age below three years and generally being unable to learn connected speech or guard against common dangers. The term belongs to a classification system no longer in use and is now considered offensive. "

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=idiot

[Kyle]

Any idiot?

idiot = "A person of profound mental retardation having a mental age below three years and generally being unable to learn connected speech or guard against common dangers. The term belongs to a classification system no longer in use and is now considered offensive. "

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=idiot

Are you for real?

Anyway...

Cloughie, I'd focus on content organization and thinking of generic terms like "bicep exercises" to organize your articles under.

Your forum is extremely established and I see a lot of your content isn't optimized as best as it can be. Re-organization should be priority, then link building can come later.

Perhaps a diagram of the body with text links which go to individual pages for each muscle group optimized for "[muscle group] exercises".

This may require you to remove certain articles, move others, and re-write others.

[Cloughie]

Thanks for everyones opinions.

Emancipator - whats the best way to build traffic from msn?

icebane - I agree, its something I am currently looking at. We are currently changing how we produce content as it is anyway, and along with that comes an entire re-organisation of our current content, including re-categorising, re-titling and in some cases re-writing.

I have a real old cms that is not very flexible, so I am getting a new one written which will be a lot easier to work with!

[Emancipator]

cloughie with MSN backlinks are key. iceBane however pointed out some VERY good pointers for you that I would strongly suggest going over. simple but important. It looks like from your post your already working on them.

How many pages do you have indexed on your sites?

[tommy_boy]

Cloughie as Chris rightly pointed out the problem with SEO is you never know when your going to get royally ****ed. My suggestion is build base traffic with MSN which can be done by any idiot. NO im not calling you an idiot, just making the point .

YES!! Like I did when I started my first site....

[Cloughie]

cloughie with MSN backlinks are key. iceBane however pointed out some VERY good pointers for you that I would strongly suggest going over. simple but important. It looks like from your post your already working on them.

How many pages do you have indexed on your sites?

Thanks!

No idea, how would I find out?

www.wannabebig.com
www.wannabebigforums.com
www.atlargenutrition.com

[Masetek]

Enter them in here:

http://www.affmarket.com/?a=webinfo

That will tell u indexed pages and backlinks for all major SE's

[Emancipator]

Great tool Masetek. I ran it on one of my sites

Pages indexed:
Google: 216,000
MSN: 5,360
Yahoo: 885,000

Backlinks:
Google: 2,030
MSN: 11,136
Yahoo: 186,000

[Kyle]

By the way, don't listen to any advice offered from Emancipator.
His idea of SEO is keyword stuffing meta tags for Altavista rankings!

[Emancipator]

lol.. i have no idea where that came from. But yeah I am definitely NOT an SEO expert I just know what works for me :P