I want to hire a consultant to evaluate my site, who is the most reputable?

I am looking for the SEO consultant with the best reputation. Could you please give me suggestions for who that could be? Thank you.


SEOquestions

What do you mean by consultancy? Do you want on-going management or just a one-off consultancy?

We can do both, but I'd be keen to see the site first etc

That makes sense. Most SEOs tend to specialise in stuff. Who is the "best" depends on your area (of biz), your budget, your goals and your courage.... I'm serious.

Good call dzine.

EGOL, SEO_AM, Fathom, rmmcarley and several others.

Personally I'd go for fathom for every SEO job except copywriting. I trust him blindly.

But if he's "full" you can always choose from this list here:
http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=349

The only one that takes on clients is mmcarley. EGOL is too busy counting his money made on personal SEO and Fathom just retired but gives his great SEO knowledge away for free. SEO_AM is waiting for soeone to give him an offer he cannot refuse... anything above $19.95.

Ok, if you are accepting clients now, I tust YOU blindly too. BTW, Randy McCarley is no moron either.

Still - pinging the O.P. - what is your niche? What is your budget? Or are you not hiring, but only interested? Please clarify............

Thank you for all your responses. I see that I cannot link to my site, but I will put in a broken link. Not trying to do any link dropping. I do want to show people what my site is though.....if that's ok.

http://www.

politicsforumpoliticalworld.com/


My niche is that I own a politics forum, and I want it to be the #1 politics forum on the internet on search engine rankings. When people type in "politics forum" or "political forum" I want my site to show up first. The forum is a catch all politics forum (world politics). However, the real politics big boards which are catch-all, have general names. The biggest boards out there are:

political crossfire forum
it's all politics forum
politics forum
political forum

This is the kind of board that I want to create. Those are the guys who are competing out there right now.

I know what it takes and I have a rough idea of how things work. I know that I have to build up a lot of backlinks and get directory entries, and whatnot, and this is a long-term investment for me. I am willing to work at this for years, in order for the forum be #1, however that's what I want it to be.

My primary concern right now is that my URL might be over-optimized and I fear getting a penalty from Google or some other search engine for it. Do you think this might happen?


Thank you


SEOquestions

As far as my budget, I am only really curious about this one question, and I guess however much that is worth depends on the source. There's one company I am looking at that charges $50 a question.

Save yourself some money. Most any question can be answered right here for free. Of course, after it is answered you can always send one of us the $50... up to you.

OK.

I also wanted to say that I got some advice from an SEO company a little while ago, so I am not going to be hiring anyone. Sorry.

However, I am still interested in feedback, if people still want to offer it.

Boy are you courageous! My own heart doesn't trust me

OK, my 5 cents, without being hired. You have the best forum software and shouldn't worry about the seo friendlyness of the site. I would like to suggest though that you add a few features to your site.

SEO these days requires more than just technical skill and a few tweaks here and there. It is a online marketing effort that intertwines all kinds of online marketing methods. So for starters I would like to suggest the following, as it would ensure good variety of rankings.

A political forum has a very big benefit in that it offers huge oppertunity for news and articles. Perhaps you would like to add these features to your site. The diversity of keywords you can potentially rank for is amazing. So first of all get this part of your site right. Stay on top of current news and get content relating to those keywords out ASAP. Article pages should link through to the forum topic where it is discussed and the forum topic should link back to articles. This way you ensure that article pages can easily be found for link bait and forum posts can easily be found for discussions. It is also a healthy internal linking structure to do this. You can also considder adding profiles of the different world leaders on your site as this can also assist with link baiting and keywords for ranking.

About forum topics. The layout of your forum is essential for ranking purposes. The selection of target keywords in your topic header/titles and descriptions can be extremely helpfull. atm you have a few topics I would have worded differently after doing a bit of keyword research.

If you need a few backlinks I might know someone that can help...