I did SEO consulting for about a year and a half up until a few months ago. My employer was pretty happy with the results -- though I haven't kept up with the field recently as I've been trying to focus more on software & web development (being a Computer Science major). If you're interested let me know what your goals are and I'll write up a proposal. I could use the job but if I see that you wouldn't benefit much from my services I will reject your proposal. In the past I've told potential clients that they would be better off going to SEOMoz (or whatever site is popular these days) to read some articles and do it themselves.

As far as promises (or guarantees rather) and SEO goes, I don't make them. A search engine is basically a "black box" as far as I see - making a guarantee would seem a bit disingenuous. The only promise I can make is that I would do my best using whatever knowledge I have.

Shoot me your details, my email is in my profile. Thanks!

Maybe I'm just blind but I can't seem to find it in your profile. I'll add my AIM screenname to my profile just in case you would rather IM me your email address.

I have class for few hours in a bit but I'll try to give you a proposal either today or tomorrow.

EDIT: Found your gmail address by following one of the sites listed in your profile. Thanks -- I'll email you later.

I think you'll find your experience with an SEO firm was fairly common (if not universal). They over promise and can't possibly deliver without a longterm (ie. prohibitively expensive) involvement with your company. The company I work for hired some of the bigger companies (SEOInc.com, Bruce Clay) and they provided some good advice. However, at the end of the day, it was up to me to implement the technical side of things and our SEO/SEM manager to work on the long term stuff. Plus, the knowledge they provided is either readily available or some new trick which is prone to change over time. Both firms cost a fortune (well, I consider it a fortune).

Save your money, hire someone junior but clever, give them 6 months to work on it part time--tell them not to try anything blackhat/fishy. I think you'd get way better bang for your buck. (They can start by adding METATAGS to the first (most important?) category (Egyptian Hookah) in your menu--Google says that keywords/description aren't that important anymore but every SEO consultant is going to tell you to do them first)...

You are sitting on a goldmine having a copy writer. Most longterm SEO is developing legitimately interesting content to encourage high-quality, inbound links. Have your copy writer colleague spend an hour or two a week writing Hookah Articles (I'll read them--always been a bit intriqued by them) and in a year your site will be killing it....

I don't post much on here, so I'll just briefly say that I run a web marketing consultancy in Denver that has worked with several start-ups and e-commerce stores. Email in my profile if you want to talk further.

Since the discussion in this thread is turning toward whether SEO should be a "buy or build" decision, I'll throw my two-cents in there, as well.

If your website is a hobby or just a side-project, I think SEO is something you can pick up by reading some of the better guides out there (SEOMoz's "Basics" guide comes to mind). This will ensure that your site doesn't have things like <title>Home</title> or inaccessible navigation.

However, all of "what there is to learn yourself" is what our firm would take care of on day 1. The real SEO (the kind that commands 6-figure salaries or 5-figure monthly retainers) is much, much more in depth than the average internet user realizes. The reason you can't learn those strategies in a day is because most successful SEO practitioners keep them private, for obvious ($$) reasons.

phpnode here on HN is pretty good: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=phpnode

Satisfied customer here. Not cheap but worth every penny.

Takrupp - I recently started my own SEO/SEM firm and one of the reasons being I have seen lots of businesses get burned with high fees and promises from SEO guys.

Here is my companies site http://www.digitalbaltoro.com/ (site is a work in progress)

We are a small shop but we have great experience. Here is the link to my Linkedin profile to give you the overview http://www.linkedin.com/in/gforst as you will see lots of experience in e-commerce.

Give me a buzz if you are interested in chatting some more. 312-566-8944 ext 102

Free SEO advice. Guaranteed replies within 24 hours. http://www.page2sucks.com

It's like a StackOverflow, but for SEO and SEM.

I'm an SEO & SEM consultant with http://piconsulting.com (excuse the page rust, we're launching something new in the near future). You can contact us via the website or you can email me directly (steve@)

Why not just learn what there is to learn yourself. It's not exactly rocket science.

One of the first major lessons of being an entrepreneur for me was that even though I probably could do everything myself it was not economical and not feasible to actually do everything myself.

That probably was the first lesson, but I still spent another two decades before it fully sank in.

There are many things that, even though not rocket science, are quite specialist in nature and it takes time and experience to get to the level where you can do just as good a job as a specialist.

I worked for a guy who set up a very successful online business here in Padova, and, yeah, he certainly didn't try and do it all. "SEO" was something he very much had a handle on though, because the site lived or died by its web presence. He brought in a couple of potential consultants to interview, but they all seemed to not really have any knowledge that we didn't already posses internally.

So - yeah, delegate, but some things you can't delegate. No idea about their business in particular, but for a lot of online businesses, keeping track of the basics is probably something you ought to have a feel for yourself.

It's similar to the idea that tech startups are most likely better off not outsourcing their development work.

The golden rule seems to be 'trust but verify', and a little bit of knowledge goes a long way during the 'verify' stage.

They may be too busy focusing on other areas of business. If so, then definitely bring in someone else.

However, I'm curious about your "not rocket science" comment. I've always generally agreed with you, but I've been watching a lot of twist lately and Calacanis keeps saying stuff about SEO guys making crazy salaries ($100k - $200k/yr). If it's really that simple, how are some guys pulling that much $?

You can make 200k selling snake oil in many fields, including SEO. That doesn't imply SEO is hard. That said, SEO at strategic levels is nontrivial, like marketing, and is worth millions in direct sales to many firms.

SEO seems to attract a lot of snake oil people though. Maybe the recipe "not hard" + "lots of money" attracts a lot of people hoping to cash in.

I think at a minimum I'd only consider hiring someone with actual development skills.

We do some SEO work ourselves, but we run three businesses here, all of them make decent amounts of money. Its not worth us to pull a partner out, have him learn SEO, implement it, etc. We'd rather pay someone that knows what they are doing and let the partners do what they're good at.

If you don't take the time to at least learn the basics and what people are going to do for the money you pay them, my guess is that you'll be an attractive target for more snake-oil salesmen. Once you've learned that, you could pretty much do things yourselves, handing off make-work things to contractors for significantly less money.

We have a pretty good idea on SEO. One of the businesses is a web marketing firm focused on Copy Writing (he's a copy writer). So, we do know the basics and can ferret out BS, but he/we believe good SEO takes time and effort. Neither of which he (or anyone else) has any interest in. Why spend weeks learning and then months implementing SEO, when you can pay someone to do it? His time is more valuable than the presumed cost of paying someone (copy writers also make serious money).

Another good reason to know some of the basic stuff is to make sure that someone does not happily blackhat you straight in to pagerank '0' territory.

As with so many things, the devil is in the details. Here's a simple keyword example:

accounting services and accounting service are different, with substantial gaps in search volume and competitiveness. Do you know which one is worth more? Do you know how much more?

There's an order of magnitude difference between the traffic on nj accounting firms and new jersey account firms. Are you sure you know which is better?

Even if you cultivate a list of hundreds keywords that are relevant, valuable and that you can be competitive in, do you know how to decide which words to try to hit via SEO and which to do via SEM? Do you have a tool that can help you make that decision quickly?

Do you know who your competitors are, what keywords they're winning on, and how strong they are on each, so you can plan an effective attack, leaving them only with the crap you don't want?

Sure, it's pretty easy to say use valid html, use alt tags, use meaningful URLs, have a header, use relevant images, make videos, get links from relevant content with good anchor text, and all the other crap that goes into SEO 101. But when you get into market analysis, competitive analysis, management of link-building campaigns, etc, it gets very involved. I'd expect that it would take smart person a year of working full-time under an expert to be good at it.... and I'd expect it to take them much longer if they're doing a part-time self-guided tour.

maybe you could share your site url?

well, is there any reason why you keep asking for emails on a site you sell products? Users don't even have time to find out what you sell and they already have a popup on their faces, not a great UX , drop me a mail if you wish ( see profile ), I will review your SEO for free and send you a report, if you feel comfortable with my report, we could go further, if not you can pick someone else, you may also try Patio , but he's most probably overbooked.

We do a lot of web marketing ourselves (just not SEO): This is a pretty proven method in building an email list. We have double opt in and our conversion rate is through the roof. We make a lot of money off of that pop up.

Paras, I know a great SEO guy, hit me up on Skype.

Send me a message (AIM sn in profile) I'll help you out, no charge. I'm the technical founder of a top 100 and top 500 site and picked up some SEO along the way.

Wanted to reach you, but frankly AOL won't let me create a new AIM account. Captcha here is broken https://new.aol.com/productsweb/?promocode=825960&ncid=t... (I'm baffled how can they afford to have their signup form broken for the past half an hour I have been trying)

Any chance you could contact me instead? I'm paras {at} wingify {dot} com

I specifically do link building services for aggressive internet marketers and most recently local small businesses. I built a full web app to handle all orders and tasks and have a full staff of workers that can pump out orders quickly and efficiently.

Register an account for free here and you can check out what I offer. We can discuss things privately if you need a strategy put together.

http://members.layeredlinks.com

Try www.pearanalytics.com. We scan your website in 30 seconds - no signup or email required. (We optimized that process by running through HN before :)