The SEO Consultant

Not all SEO practitioners are consultants just as not all SEO consultants are practitioners.

Generally speaking SEO consultants are the strategists of SEO, they advise without necessarily being involved in the implementation with their main requirements being knowledge experience and impartiality and a good grounding in the past history of Google and SEO.

Knowledge and experience are the obvious major factors that qualifies the SEO consultant, search engine optimisation tactics change regularly as loopholes are closed or new ones discovered, and experience shows that while these may well bring short-term gain it's often at the risk of long-term pain.

With the SEO/SEM sector "exploding" in recent years short-cuts and practices have been adopted that would have raised eyebrows a few years ago, and here again knowledge and experience are crucial in determining which ones are best avoided.

Impartiality is likewise important, in 2007 links seem to dominate the SEO sector and appear to be the one-size-fits-all solution offered by many SEO services, an SEO consultant on the other hand may see linkage as just one of the factors to address.

A site audit prepared by an SEO consultant may well differ quite markedly from one prepared by an SEO service.

I'd expect a consultants' audit to focus a lot more on the site itself, from its architecture to its conversion factor as experience should show little point in achieving high rankings when the site is itself the weak link.

So if you're looking for an SEO consultant where should you start?

You could check out the Google forum moderators on the likes of Webmasterworld and see who they link to in their personal sites, chances are the links are to experienced operators rather than to recent arrivals.

There's also a couple of directories to try, I'd start by looking for someone with at least five years experience and preferably from your own country.

SEMPO - international.
SEO Consultants - international, only one with Irish members and with entry guidelines.