I've heard that there are people who I can pay to help increase my search engine rankings. Have you used any such service? Which would you say gets the best results?
You can try the Buy Sell section. I hired a guy from India. Didn't work for me, so I do it myself now. And its working good for me.
If you do hire someone to do your SEO, get a detailed report of what they plan on doing. If they rant and rave about optimizing meta tags, monthly keyword reporting, creating you multiple doorway pages, heavy use of software that they say automates the process etc. stay away from them. It will be a waste of your money.
Good point. Automatic is bad as per SEO in most cases. Most of the people you gonna hire will use software to do more work in less time. There are some good ones, but you not gonna know until you try them.