Looking to hire an SEO for a Technical Review of my site

[ShootTokyo]

Hi

I am new to SEO.  I am the photographer and blogger behind the photography blog ShootTokyo.   I am looking to make sure my site is optimized the best it can be for SEO.  My site is a hobby for me but has really grown.  I am looking make sure I have best practices implemented. I am not looking for quick fixes or try to cheat the system but to make sure I have a good solid foundation in place for SEO.

I don't have a lot of experience nor a lot of free time so I want to make sure whatever free time I spend on this is really productive.  I am looking to initially hire someone to do a technical assessment of my site and identify any fundamental issues I should address first.   Once I have the assessment I am looking for advice on putting together a work plan on what I need to do and the best way to approach it.   How can I best use the tools Moz is offering me?  Which things are higher value that I should work on first, specific to my site?  For more technical things I might hire this person to implement them or teach me how to implement them.

If this is your business can you please let me know what your qualifications, experience, a link to your site and give me a range of what you might charge for something like this (you can email me details if you don't want to post here).  If this isn't your business but have a recommendation I would love one.

I am Tokyo based so ideally someone either in Asia, Europe or West Coast of US as it makes it easier to connect live if needed.

Thanks

Dave

[JVRudnick]

As Egol has said....it's all true...and as he never takes any consulting....he's unavailable

But DO look up Alan on google - and you'll find he's one of the best known, most revered, most reputable audit guys out there...in fact I couldn't even name a peer of his....he's def the one to contact.

[AlanBleiweiss]

David,

EGOL has already offered some good guidance. Beyond that though...

Since you've openly posted this request I'll respond accordingly (I do not usually even think about direct pitching in Q&A).

I've been doing internet marketing 20 years, SEO 15. My primary business the past few years is site audits. If you would like to learn more, you can visit my site, where I go into depth about my background and what you can expect from an audit.  Pricing is also communicated there.

[EGOL]

Wow, you do have a lot of fantastic photos of interesting subjects.  Why doesn't McDs have those nice burgers at my local restaurant?

This is what I would do if I owned your site.  My goal with these would be to attract increasing amounts of traffic.

1. Unlike most photographer sites we see here, you have a nice amount of text content.  That is great.  My goal would always be to kick it up a little more and say a bit more about each photo or  a bit more of an introduction or a closing piece for each page of the site.   I know that you took a lot more photos than what are posted here.  Maybe comment on why you like each photo, why you selected it, more about what it shows.  Every additional diverse word related to the topic on the page has the opportunity to attract more traffic.  Place names can be especially valuable.

2. The Archive Pages VS Category Pages. At the top of your blog you have links to archive pages.   I think that you would get a lot more browsing by visitors if those were replaced by your category pages.  That is my assumption.  I would test it to find out if my site gets more pageviews per visitor with categories instead of archives in the top navigation - or you can include both archive and category in the top nav.

I used to include archive pages on my sites but from experience they attracted very little traffic from search.  Why?  Their title tags did match very many queries in the search engines.   You can check your analytics to see if this is true.  Are they pulling in traffic from search?   In comparison, my category pages pulled in a lot of traffic from search.   Also, my archive pages were not viewed very much.  So, I removed my archive pages from the site.  That directed all of the power that originally went into them into other parts of the site and I believe that elevated the performance of the site overall.

3. Linking between your topic pages.   I don't see a lot of linking between the content pages of your site.  If you have other pages with related photos, related locations, related topics, etc. you can lift visitor engagement by linking to them.  Also, the text links in your content are simply slightly darker font.  I would change that to a bright blue and underlined.  That shouts the presence of the links and attract attention.  That should move more visitors between the pages of your site and up the engagement, maybe up search performance too as google finds more keyword connectivity between your pages, lower bounce rate, higher browser rate.

4. Title tags.   In my opinion, your title tags are brief and very often include only very common words such as "Behind the Scenes" and "Lunch in the Clouds".  These generally don't perform as well in search as titles with the nouns of products, geography, people, organizations, etc.   Consider changing "Lunch in the Clouds" to... "Lunch with Mt. Fuji and Tokyo Through The Clouds".   I think it will get more traffic from search.  I would do this with lots of the titles if this was my website.

I hope that you find something useful here.  I offer this information to be helpful.  I am not looking to be hired because I have enough work on my own sites.