Becka

Don't do that. Ever.
 
Firstly, why should your client pay for you to teach yourselves? Secondly, you could screw over their website then they'd have to pay someone, like me, more money to fix things.
 
If you seriously want to get into it, and it's not just because everyone else is doing it and you think you can earn a lot of money, then buy domains yourself, build websites and practice on them. Don't **** around with someones business. Especially if they're paying you.
 
How do you go about getting into it? You need to learn more than the basics before you consider offering SEO as a service. You need to understand how search engines work, how they crawl, why they crawl, what they see, how they work out keywords, how they look at the value of links, how the determine relevancy. Then you need to look at link building, content creation, how to up someones conversion rate, how to map good internal linking blah blah blah blah.
 
Also, and this is coming from a freelance SEO, it would take a long while for me to teach you everything that we know. It's not something that can be condensed into 2 months of work. I've spent just under 4 years building up my experience and knowledge and I still know I'm not going to be winning awards anytime soon.
 
Your current options are:

Say no, offer them the number of somebody trusted and leave it at that.
Start to practice and learn. It won't happen over night and it's going to be a long and hard process but if you're committed, you'll learn. Still say no, pass on number of a good SEO.
Team up with an SEO and work on a white label basis. The SEO will provide your client the work under the name of your company. This way, you can earn a bit of cash and keep everything under one roof.
Expand and look for a third partner who has great online marketing knowledge.
Practice on somebodys website who is paying you money based on good faith and you **** it all up

 
Basically, what i'm saying is you need to learn, absorb, practice and enjoy it! But never use a clients website to test things. Thats a big, bad no!
 
I'm not trying to be all "my precious" about SEO. It's just see every web design company thinking they can offer amazing services because they know how to put keywords into a website. Or they boast about ranking a ****ty website for a keyword that has never been searched before and I don't want you guys thinking it's just a nice little earner without much output. If you're completely new to the industry, you might think you know a lot, but believe me, you won't.

Shame really and because of this people are starting to prefer to do their own SEO, I know we do. There are some really great SEOs out there but it's like finding a diamond in the dirt. Another problem is some black hat SEOs earn a lot more money than white hat.

It seems like anyone will do anything to get a backlink these days. I had a client thought it would be OK to pay by an eCheque though Paypal for an advertisement and cancel it as soon as he was listed (without notifying me).
 
Shame that there are dishonest people out there giving real SEO analysts a bad name.

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So this forum obviously has a lot of designers on it... So lets put our opinions on the table!
 
The new facebook layout, what's your thoughts?
 
I really like it! I like the fact its all about the news feed and stories! Big images, big text a much more simple layout and all the navigation you need within a couple of pixels length! (Someone give me the dimensions of a car yesterday... I asked them to convert it to pixels for me... the joke was wasted!!)
 
Also the navigation down the left hand side has shown me how many sh*t pages I am part of lol

...If someone paid you for 6 months (Enough to get by) and gave you the time to develop/create your own company/product what exactly would you make?

It's an interesting idea, freedom for 6 months to create anything you wanted or wished you had more time to do...

I feel the same sometimes esp when i woke up, a bit nostalgic.. well whatever plans we made, life comes in the middle atleast for me. so yeah right now working as a web designer and dont know when i will switch..