How much can I expect to pay to have one of my dating websites optimized? Also, what - if any - guarantees can I expect? And what services? I have seen ads listing a wide range of prices and am wondering what is the norm, if any.
Dating is quite a competitive market. Remember, you get what you pay for. A good SEO company would charge several thousands to work with you on such a hard theme. They would work on the on-page optimization and clean up your code, and they would gather good, themed backlinks. If they offer some kind of guarantee, run away. No one can guarantee a ranking. Asking for a price here would be a waste of time. As I said, you can find someone that will charge you 500 bucks, and someone that will charge you 10,000 bucks. You just need to do your homework. Ask them for a price quote and for examples of their clients. YOu will be amazed of how many "professional" seos love to show off their incredible rankings with keywords such as "marine blue swordfish" and "excellent dominican potatoes".
I would suggest that you do it yourself! Step 1: Clean your site's code and site structure. At the most, hire someone only to do this for you if you are not sure what to do. All you need to do is ensure that there aren't any stray HTML tags just sitting there on your pages, doing nothing. If you use Dreamweaver, you probably won't have this problem but if you use most of the other HTML editors you will need to clean the code. Step 2: Go out there and get as many BLs as you can get. That's going to be very important in your case since you are looking at a pretty competitive market. Instead of paying SEOs, I would suggest spending all that money either purchasing adverts on sites that pass PR and send some quality traffic your way. OR, hiring someone just to work on your Links Campaign for you. You'll get much better reurns from money spent this way than paying SEOs, IMO.