I am going to post an ad on elance to have someone rebuild my website (www.unique-capital.com) - make it flashier, nicer, optimized, etc... I know I want it optimized, a links section for backlinks etc... what would you put in there as a list of things that the site must have? 1. Optimized for search engines 2. google spider text file (whatever it's called) or sitemap? 3. A reciprocal backlinks page that self-checks other backlinks to the site 4. proper and different headers for each page 5. etc... what would be the most important things you request to be part of the building of the site? thanks!
Be careful with sites like eLance - a lot of the people there claim they're experts with "years" of experience (probably because they have a bunch of people with limited experience and they're padding their total experience by adding them all together) even though they're clearly not. You're going to want to focus on having an accessible and usable site (and I don't mean just for the disabled - I mean for everybody, including search engine spiders) with quality relevant content that people want to naturally link to. Given your specific industry, you're going to additionally need to have your page copy cater to your prospective clients as well as your existing client base, so make sure the Web copywriter knows exactly the type of audience your site and company deal with on a daily basis. Make sure the robots.txt file blocks access to those pages and sections of your site you do not want/need to be crawled (such as the back-end). I also suggest using the least amount of clean, minimal, semantic and valid X/HTML markup (if you choose to go with XHTML, make sure it's served as text/html so that IE can parse it and not force a file download, and that the XHTML code adheres to all the requirements laid out in Appendix C of the XHTML 1.0 specification - do NOT use XHTML 1.1 for ANY reason whatsoever) with the CSS and JavaScript code separated from the markup by including them in external .css and .js files (I also prefer that the JavaScript be unobtrusive - meaning there's no inlined scripting and that all scripts be called from a library.js file or other sort of library from within the HEAD section of the Web page if possible; of course, some scripts, such as ad networks, simply don't allow for this, which proves that there are always exceptions to the golden rule). You're going to hear a lot of nonsense and drivel about stuffing keywords inside H1 tags and building backlinks - ignore them. From what you've listed, it sounds like you have a fairly good handle on what needs to be done, and so I suggest you look at the development of your site from an information architecture point of view rather than an SEO one, since 95% of the SEO "professionals" on this forum are actually getting it wrong. You can learn more by reading the Search Engine Optimization FAQ and Chris Beasley's free comprehensive Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Guide.