What do you look for in SEO consultant?

[Mickeroo]

Hi all,

If you use an outside person/company/service to help with SEO (or even if you do it yourself), what would say are the important skills and knowledge they should have? Can a company that does SEO for non-adult companies be effective in the adult space?

It seems like everyone promises the moon but seems to come up short of specifics when asked how they intend to make it happen.

Any advice is appreciated! Thanks so much.

Mike E.

[Lee]

Anyone who is offering 'SEO Services' typically sucks at SEO, whether in adult or mainstream.

That is unless you are willing to spend 1000's upon 1000' of dollars a month for their services.

Garys real-estate office uses a service that charges upwards of $5k a month, per site, and their work is still not guaranteed... In fact, some of the sites they have worked on have had better results when *I* have SEO's them, free of charge.

Regards,

Lee

[Bec]

Not having an understanding of Adult would hurt you in my honest opinion. Any keyword targeting would be severly handicapped if they are niche clueless.

[gaybucks_chip]

There are several people that post here and on Gaydemon.biz who have good knowledge of SEO. All of them say that hiring an SEO guru is pretty much never worthwhile, because the ones that don't know what they are doing can get you permanently banned from search engines, and the ones that are really good are (a) impossible to find and (b) incredibly expensive.

There have been several SEO workshops on various boards (including, I think, this one) and many of the knowledgeable people will help you out for free if you ask nicely

[100boys]

Believe me, less SEO is more sometimes and you can teach yourself the basics if you spend a few hours a day for 2 weeks or so on reading SEO articles.
If you follow certain rules and don't "over-seo" your site then the simple seo basic will do pretty well if you're not targeting high competition keywords (such as gay porn, twinks, teens...).
You will need the knowledge anyways if you're planning to run more than one site and you woulnd't want to pay for a SEO company each time again

[Mickeroo]

Thanks everyone for your replies!

What you all have said tends to confirm what I've been thinking, which is that the whole SEO space is a bit sketchy and that it's hard to find people who really know what they are doing.

We've had some people do work for us in the past and I've been pretty dubious of the results, particularly when they charge us handsomely for something very basic that I later read in an article here or on one of the many SEO-related sites.

My reason for asking was to see if you all thought this was something best left to "the experts" but I'm hearing a definite "no"

Cheers,
Mike