Who is a good Consultant in SEO? On a very generic way... someone who knows the industry his client is in and knows it sometimes better than the client himself (happens quite often) together with all optimisation techniques and metrics for that industry. Unfortunaltely, there is no longer a ?generic SEO professional? anymore, the SEO status is much more specialised this days.
A good SEO should be able to explain their clients why they are ranking were, and why their competitors outrank them. Did you know that Google "tweaked" it's algorithms 451 times in 2007? That's about 8 times per week. The rate of change (and intelligence) in search engines will only increase in the future - look for close to 600 "adjustments" to Google in 2008 - about 2 changes per day. Your SEO Consultant should be familiar with this information, is their business to know.
A good SEO expert understands this, and helps the client develop true, relevant content. They build it around researched and tested data, and the core needs of the client's audience. Thus, a good SEO advisor should be in your campaing at the early stages, to be at the core of your entire site development strategy, not afterwards. This person can help you develop you entire concept and site plan around what real people are out there really looking for. You will not be losing traffic as search engines get more intelligent ? your site will only gain more credibility.
Search engines are not human, they are machines. While your site needs to have very relevant content, made for human consumption, and be ready to answer questions on search terms humans choose, it is all delivered via an artificial intelligence ?servant? ? the search engine index system, which has an stablished protocol. Your SEO needs to understand how search engines crawl, index, evaluate, and score sites for final rankings. The whole indexing process is unfamiliar to most SEOs. A Technical SEO Consultant knows and uses this methodoly at the core of their SEO services.
