Affordable search engine optimizers

[web-content-king]

What are the going rates for SEO services, for a small site looking for about 4 or 5 competitive keywords? I am of course including the link-building and any project costs, which would be the truly hard part. Are there any SEOs that allow you to pay monthly or weekly for services as they are going on? Or do they all want upfront payment?

Sumantra Roy's company, http://www.1stsearchranking.net/, offers a package for $1500. That sounds too good to be true. Anyone know about this service?

I've heard so many bad things about SEO firms, and the nature of the beast is that they could get you to the top of the rankings and google would drop you down a week later b/c it decided to revert to its old index.

[Paul B]

Anything that sounds too good to be true usually is.

The link you supplied is not available - but if it is the same as http://www.1stsearchranking.com/ the fact that they do NOT appear in google themselves suggest their techniques got them banned!

[web-content-king]

That's so strange--when I posted that message they still had a PR 5 and they were using the .net url. Now the .net url forwards to a .com url...all weird

there was a big to-do a couple years ago b/c they expanded big time and at the same time google adjusted its algorithm so all their sites got bounced. But I thought they had taken care of it.

My question stands--any affordable seos and/or ones who allow pay-as-you go, monthly etc.

[SEOforGoogle]

web-content-king -
Any SEO firm worth their value will not come cheap. SEO is a time consuming task with very little room for any automated processes.

Like the old saying goes, "You get what you pay for." Keep that in mind while doing research for a SEO firm.
For your situation, get prices from 5 different firms you are considering. I know a lot of people judge a seo firm on two things: Where that company ranks for "search engine optimization" in Google, and they check the PR of their site.

To judge a company by these two standards is absurd. You should ask for a client list, and then more importantly, ask to talk to their clients. Anyone can produce a list of clients, but a firm that is willing to let you talk to their clients is not hiding anything.

Also, you should expect to pay anywhere from 5k up to 20k just to "activate" the site, and depending on how many keywords you want to optimize for, you should expect to pay anywhere from $150 - $5,000 a month.

[web-content-king]

The prices you just quoted are in the ballpark of what I thought it would cost.

Now I need to ask two specific questions:

1) Do SEO firms/freelancers ever offer installment plans or do they all charge 100% upfront? A flat $5,000 payment would break my bank considering I have other costs.

2) Can you get a site optimized for just a handful of keywords, say, four? All the sites I've seen start with 25 keywords.

3) Would there be any value in just hiring a group that does link exchange, since that is the most time-consuming part of the thing by far? Or should they all come in one package?

[web-content-king]

Pardon my indelicacy, but as someone who's trying to figure all this out, I have to ask: why does your site have a PR of 0? I haven't even started optimizing my site and it has a PR of 2.