Seo Professional Required - Site structure

I have a site which I would like to start optimizing as best I can. Right now, I'm most concerned with best practices for site structure, how to punctuate urls appropriately, and if it is a good idea to hide file extensions and how to do it, meta tags, etc.. Also concerned with internal link structure and how to maximize page rank and not bleed juice to unimportant pages. Down the road I want to also launch a link campaign and need to have an idea on how to do so. I want to get the basic structure right before I do this so I'm not searching all over the web to correct backlinks.

Basically I'm new in SEO and would like to hire someone to consult with, It's not a huge site by any means, so I would consider this project to be fairly small. Maybe a couple hours or so. This site is part of my business, so I'm really looking for someone who knows what they are doing. Thanks for reading.

You probably wouldn't need to hire someone, especially if It is a small project. What you are asking about is pretty basic stuff.

I would start by asking one questions at a time, perhaps figuring out where you want to start.... Site navaigation is probably a good one.

One thing I do know is that you dont need to hide file extensions. If you have URL's with many variables, It is a good practice to rewrite them, or use static URLS instead.

Which of these will have the highest probability of success?

The answer.... they will each provide less than maximum results.

If you really want to do it right... Do it yourself, test it, tweak it and then hire someone really smart to look at it and give you ideas. Also have a couple of trusted friends look at it with you and give you ideas.

Two heads are better than one. They see amazing things that you would never have thought of. $$$ That's what friends are for!

If you are not doing collaborative SEO you are leaving money on the table.

(I don't recommend forum site reviews. They invite competition and the people posting may know a lot less than you.)

Thanks for the advice. Maybe I should just take it one step at a time, so I'll start with my question...my site is book-club-reviews.com and I want to start placing for keywords around the name of the club. I have all the clubs arranged like book-club-reviews.com/clubs/clubname/index.php

Should I remove the "clubs" folder and have everything in the root. I like it the way it is for organization for me, but would Google rank me higher for "clubname" without "clubs" in the url putting "clubname" in the root. Also, in my site maps and navigation, should I even include or do I need to include "index.php" on the end of each of my urls, it kinda looks better without it in my opinion, but what about the engines point of view?

You should leave the URLS as they are so as not to lose any existing rankings, if you change them it will be as if the page is completely new, and any old links and or relevancy built on that page would be lost.

I generally use the folder name as the page for the link in a sitemap, or anywhere else for that matter. You dont want to get teh search engines thinking that

yoursite.com/folder
and
yoursite.com/folder/index.ext are two different pages, also when linking within your website also link to /folder/ rather than /folder/index.ext

Well the site is pretty new and I have been making changes to the urls (I know it's like starting over) but I just want to have them as optimized as they can be for the long run. (Hence why I'm here asking about it) Can't I change them and then do a 301 redirect from the old urls (don't know exactly how to do that, but I think this is what I would use it for.) Also, if I already have had all the links in my site and sitemap pointing to the "index.php" and I change them to just having the folder name, do you think I could get hit with dup content because they are already indexed by index.php.

Basically I want to set my site up as best as possible for the long run....I'm not really getting any organic traffic at the moment so I figure this would be the time to do it. If it really doesn't make much difference, then I will leave things the way they are, but if it can help me in the long run to place higher than competitors I guess it's now or never. I don't want to lose possible rankings because I didn't include dashes in file names, put everything as close to root as possible, or not list my links as site/folder instead of site/folder/index.php. Thanks again for all your advice!