Does anyone have any good referrals to a SEO company or person?

Sean

Here's why…

Each web page is ranked for importance (and relevance). If a highly ranked and relevant site links to you, your site's page rank goes up. That's because the search engines figure that if a highly ranked site references another site the content on the referenced site must be valuable or the highly ranked site would not point to it. The concept, BTW, comes from academic papers. The more a paper gets cite by other papers the more important it must be. If you want to see one, check this out. Boring!

So think of page rank as currency. You have X page rank currency to give to each outbound link. If you only link out, you deplete your currency. Each good inbound link ups your rank a bit. The best a link exchange can get you is a wash (unless you exchange with CNN). However, if you are clearly participating in a link trading operation the major search engines will punish you. The best approach is to have great content (that people will link to) and request inbound links from local directories and spa/salon centric sites. If you have an SEO or web "guy" telling you different, get a new one.