I just got off the phone with a friend who wants to know where he can find the best deal on having an SEO specialist optimize his site. My first thought was Rent A Coder. It’s a place where you place a job request posting and freelancers bid to do the work for you. Each freelancer has a rating (1-10) and feedback you can read about to see if you are hiring the right person.

I’ve used them dozens of times of coding projects, writing assignments and even some marketing campaign work. I’ve even handled a couple SEO projects through them to test the waters.

One of the most amazing things I find is the difference in prices I see with each posting. For one SEO job in particular, I had proposals ranging from $25 to $1,200 – for the same job! I finally settled on a coder that said he could do it for $75 – and he did a fantastic job of tweaking my original SEO work (mine was all raw HTML and he added some ASP functionality and more). The site topped MSN in two weeks!