Paying an SEO Expert?

I am wondering if any of you have paid someone to come and work on the SEO for your site?

It's not my area of expertise, and I think it's the most important way for us to reach new members. Our Pagerank is still 1, we are lacking on a lot of the terms we should be seeing, and I'm not totally sure if we're doing our Facebook Page correctly.

Are there services who can help us out there? If so, how much would this usually cost? I'd way rather work with someone friendly / affordable / honest, than some big corporation.

Thanks!

 

I have heard plenty of people say recently that SEO matters less and less today. And that you should just focus on good content. But I don't know how true that is.

Greg

 

Thank you both for your replies! I guess my frustration is that we drive new content every single day, we have by far the most active forum in our niche (there are 3-4 others), and yet we are still coming in last with search results. And like I said, our Pagerank stinks. If you have any suggestions, I would love to hear them before handing out $400 to a freelancer.

 

We just write articles and try to include good keywords. Each article has 500+ likes on Facebook, but Google just seems to hate us.

I also think vBulletin CMS may not be the best for SEO?

Is this a good idea? I've tried making a blog (Wordpress) named after a common keyword in a subdirectory. So mysite.com/commonkeyword

In here, I have small previews of each of our articles, with terminology swapped to match optimal Google search results. In each article, I link back to our main CMS.

I already have a sitemap submitted for my main www site - do I also need to submit one for this new subdirectory? Or will it be crawled automatically?

Thanks!

 

I've never asked for an SEO expert to do "SEO" work on my community because I've learned its cheaper to do it on your own.

 

I for one have not hired any paid SEO expert for either my blog or forums. So, I'd say no, I have no experience with it.

 

If I were trying to target extremely competitive keywords then I might consider shopping around for a great service but I'd rather gradually learn how to do my own SEO and then make money on the side helping others.

 

I really need to learn SEO. I have admit I'm probably the worst here on the forum with it...

Any good websites or articles to started with?

 

Learning to do some SEO can be tough initially. I will suggest you a site called Quicksprout. It's one of the best sites for beginners.

 

I agree with you here, it seems that nowadays, especially over the last 6 months the more SEO that I try to do the less results I get back. Yet if I set up a site and do hardly any SEO, only a couple back links to get started and just concentrate on content then it pays off better in the search engines.

 

I wrote this a few years ago but (most of) it is still appropriate advice today: Basic forum SEO: Start with the simple things

 

SEO is not as complicated as you would like to imagine, actually once you buy SEO ready articles, there really isn't much an SEO expert can do for you. What would remain is for you to ensure that your site is well designed with sitemaps and what not and then everything else, traffic and page rank will slowly pick up. This is a long term investment and don't to get traffic to your site in a short time. It usually takes 6 months to 2 years for you to really start to harvest good money from your website.

 

If you find that your competition is ahead of your in the serps just do what a SEO guy would do if you hire him.

First, find out whether your site is under-optimized or worse whether it is over-optimized for SEO. Check the Forum structure to see whether it violates any fundamental SEO rules.

Reverse engineer competition i.e. those Forums that are ahead of you in rankings and find out where they are getting their backlinks from, how powerful those backlinks are, what their site structure is etc. I think it is most important to study your competition carefully and find out what they are doing right.

If you use the right tools you can find out enough information about all the sites that are above yours and then take steps to improve your rankings.

Hope it makes sense :-).

 

No, I've never paid an SEO expert to assist with my site because I have been trying to learn all I can about it. I, myself, want to be an SEO expert. I think it's important as bloggers, freelance writers, and writers in general to be able to write well written content using SEO.

 

I've never paid for any type of SEO help or service. I think it is better for me to learn all about it myself rather then someone doing it for me.

 

Never paid for any SEO work/help here either,

 

There is no problem in hiring someone to do SEO for you but you must get hold of an experienced person who knows SEO like the back of his hand. I have used SEO gigs for my sites but I made sure that I created the first tier of backlinks myself. There are lots of companies and individuals in this field who'd promise you the moon but in reality they will just blast your site with low quality backlinks. Stay away from fly by night operators and stick with reputed providers that work hard and deliver results.

 

I am a major proponent of content over SEO (obviously you can do both, but focus on content). Why? Bad Content + Good SEO = trouble every time the search engines refine their algorithms. Good Content + Bad SEO probably benefits in that circumstance.

Also, it is infinitely harder to fix bad content than it is to fix bad SEO. Content generation takes time, while SEO takes considerably less. Search engines are also trying to get closer and closer to good content at the top of their lists instead of people who just optimize but have crap content. Because of this, content will be a sound investment.