More complex websites and greater provider overhead costs will influence your final SEO bill.  Your company's SEO budget will probably have to take into account the following services:  initial evaluation, keyword/search term research, site/page optimization, basic directory submissions, link campaign(s), site progress reports, and search engine news public relations (i.e. press releases).

In the world of SEO, there are several optimization factors which influence pricing:

#1. How hard your site will be to optimize.
#2. How many terms you want optimized.
#3. How many pages you want optimized.
#4. What overhead expenses, such as sales reps, your optimization firm will apply against your account besides the cost of  the actual technicians involved.

In general, for professional optimization from an experienced SEO firm, you should count on spending anywhere from just under $10,000 per year to $50,000 per month, the latter being a large, complex site or a client with multiple sites.

On the other hand, you may be able to find a small, hungry SEO consultant. Small sites, or ones that change infrequently, can find much more affordable options. One marketer we spoke to paid $150 for an initial report and $100 per month for an updated report with tips to optimize the small site of her one-person company. Still, keep in mind that she had yet to implement those changes, so it’s unknown how effective this approach is.

Tactic #1. Initial evaluation

SEO evaluation reports vary widely, but they tend to fall into two categories. The first is current rankings reports that show where your site stands for a list of top keywords in your marketplace. Many search firms offer this service for free as an incentive to gather sales leads. It’s interesting for you and low cost for them because they can use an automated system to generate your report.

The second is a full-throttle site optimization evaluation. This may include:

• Examining your site’s structure and content management system
• Reviewing your current traffic reports
• Researching and creating an initial list of potential search terms for which to optimize
• Reviewing your competitor’s tactics to get high rankings
• Speaking to your staff about their training needs

Your final report should include detailed estimates of optimization, submission and training costs; rough estimates of traffic that can be generated from SEO; a competitive outlook; and initial recommendations about technology (such as your content management or Web metrics systems) that may require further investment on your part to aid in SEO.

These days many SEO firms are charging for the full-scale evaluation, which you can buy a la carte or as part of your complete optimization package (depending on the vendor). Depending on the complexity of your site, how useful your Web metrics reports are and the competitiveness of your niche, expect to pay anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars for this. It’s basically a consulting fee for hours spent in research and writing. If an SEO firm charges only a tiny amount for the hours they’ll supposedly spend, you have to wonder how thorough the report will be.

If you need documentation to present to a board or CEO, or if you need explicit detail for future budgeting or planning purposes, this report will be extremely useful for you.

Tactic #2. Keyword/search term research

You’d think picking words to describe your company or products would be quick and easy. It isn’t. In fact, the words marketers first chose to describe their products and services were invariably way off target.

The two most common mistakes:

Mistake A: Buzzwords or terminology that real people don’t use to describe stuff.

Mistake B: Broad terms such as “gifts” that your site is not so relevant for that you’ll beat out all the other gift-selling sites on the planet and please every single visitor who arrives looking for something specific.

Yes, there are plenty of automated systems - such as Wordtracker.com and services on Google - that can help you develop keyword lists at little charge. But generally, you get what you pay for.

An SEO expert will develop your keyword list with an eye toward:

• Terms your optimized site has a real chance of getting top 10 rankings for
• Terms your competitors have overlooked
• Terms that highly qualified prospects for your offerings would be using

How many terms should you optimize for?

You have two main limitations: Budget (each term you optimize for takes more SEO time - and time is money) and Web pages. You can only optimize a particular page for one or two terms without making it so broad in topic that it will never get a good ranking.

In general, marketers are surprised by the raft of keywords an SEO rm suggests they optimize for. Don’t be - the odds are really good your SEO rm isn’t trying to rip you off. Sure, they don’t know your business as well as you do, so some keywords suggested may be off target, but they’ll suggest them to get your input.

Plus, SEO people know that in general, the more terms you optimize for, the more traffic you’ll get. Good keywords are like chocolate bonbons. Clients we’ve spoken to usually get hooked by results into constantly searching for new terms to gobble up. But how do you know if it’s worth investing in optimization in a specific keyword? If it falls into any of the following categories, it’s a good choice for optimization:

• If a term does well for you in paid search. (The converse isn’t necessarily true, however. If it does badly in paid search, it still may be a good one because other factors can bring down results including competitors, inexpert copywriting and lousy landing pages.)
• If, when discussing your products or services, your actual customers tend to repeatedly use a term without prompting. Telephone interviews and in-person focus groups are hugely helpful for this.
• If it’s a term your site’s internal search results show a lot people tend to search for once they get to your site.
• If it’s a term your site visitor metrics show that you already get some search engine visitors from, even though you are not ranked in the top five results.

Although the amount of traffic a term receives is important, what’s more critical is the likelihood the visitors will be thrilled to find what they need at your site and will convert to whatever action you’d like them to take (purchase, registration, etc.) at a high enough rate that it will cover the cost of optimizing for the term.

So, if you don’t have any sense of your site’s conversions, don’t invest in the iffy keywords yet. Ask the SEO to pick the safest ones on the list and use the rest of your budget on good metrics and possibly also on conversion-related site improvements. You can always go back and optimize for the iffy keywords later.

In fact, the best SEO rms treat keyword and conversion research as an ongoing project lasting the lifetime of your account. In addition to maintaining your ranking with current keywords, they should be examining your results and, based on the new data, suggesting new keywords on a regular basis.

Remember, the words consumers and prospects search for will change over time because of seasonality, what’s in the news, industry trends, product introductions and more. You’ll never ever have a final, complete list of keywords.

One last word of warning: If the list of search terms you get is fairly short and all the terms seem so extremely targeted that there’s little likelihood of competition (for example, your company name, your site name or your trademarked product name), the firm’s doing a lazy job and probably not worth the investment.

Yes, those terms should be on the list, but they should not be the only ones. And if there is a performance guarantee linked to the list, make sure it doesn’t refer to only these super-easy terms to optimize for.

Tactic #3. Site/page optimization

Site optimization is hands-on, hour-by-hour work. In general, it can’t be done quickly with an automated program. The number of hours required depends upon the shape your site is in, the number of pages and search terms, how carefully the copy must be written to match your official brand rules, how many images are on your site and other factors.

The following may take place:

• Reprogramming for search crawler friendliness

If your site is built with any of the following elements, your SEO firm may have to do some significant reprogramming or work with your design team to get reprogramming done:

o Flash intro or heavy use of Flash, DHTML and audio- or video-rich media
o Heavy use of graphics without text-based writing to describe them
o Required cookies or session IDs
o Content barriers such as required registration or paid membership
o Splash pages
o Frames
o Multiple pages identical or almost identical in content (for example, if you’ve been running landing page tests)

The good news is that none of the above is impossible to work around if you’ve got a good SEO firm behind you. (Worth noting: PDFs, which used to be a problem to optimize, are no longer an issue as most search engine crawlers can *see* them.)

• Writing various tags

Many people still think that putting search terms in various site tags, such as title tags, meta tags and alt tags, is all there is to optimization. This may have been the case years ago, but they are by no means the only critical elements to getting highly ranked anymore.

Once your SEO expert has written tags for your existing pages and images, you’ll also need to set up an ongoing plan to handle what will happen whenever there’s new content added to your site. Either someone in-house will have to be trained or you’ll need to contact your SEO firm regularly.

• Putting keywords in hyperlinks

The names of links that hold the site together, and those that link to your site from elsewhere, should also be re-written to feature keywords.

• Visible copy on the page

Search engines give a lot of weight to the copy that’s on each page, and, yes, they can distinguish between standard template copy, such as your navigation bar, and the unique copy on that particular page. Therefore, you need to make sure your unique copy is optimized because navigation bars alone won’t do the job.

A good SEO firm will be able to intertwine key terms into the phrasing in your headlines, subheads and body copy without interrupting the average reader’s flow. In fact, great optimization shouldn’t be apparent to the untrained eye at all.

If you are a company that lives and dies by tiny tweaks in copy - for example, a high-power direct response firm - you’ll need to choose a firm with a copy expert on staff who understands nuances that might escape an otherwise competent technician. There’s a science and an art to great SEO copy, and we’re moving from a field dominated by scientists to one populated by good artists.

Some SEO firms will recommend that instead of, or in addition to, optimizing your current site, you also allow them to build a series of separate pages or an entirely different site. This is not without risk.

If the SEO firm hosts these pages or sites on their own server, separate from your site, they may charge you a pay-per-click fee or a monthly hosting fee. If you cease working with that SEO firm, you generally do not get to keep these pages or sites they developed for you. (Look in the fine print in the contract for who owns copyright to the extra pages.) So, aside from the traffic you already received, your investment is wasted as an ongoing campaign.

Tactic #4. Basic directory submissions

We’ve all gotten them - those spam emails from a search marketing firm (or someone purporting to be from a search marketing firm) promising to submit your site to hundreds of search engines.

You know as well as we do that these folks won’t do a good job for your site, and there’s a reason they’re spamming to get new business. First of all, only a handful of search engines account for the vast majority of Web traffic. If you can’t get on those, the other “hundreds” won’t do you much good. Right now, Yahoo! is the only major engine to accept paid directory submission.

Most reputable SEO firms recommend that you only pay to submit a few handpicked sites. For example, you’ll probably want to submit a new site or new site section to Yahoo!’s directory via Yahoo! Directory Submit, which, as of September 2006, costs $299 per year ($600 for adult sites).

You may also want to submit yourself at places such as Business.com or Netscape’s Open Directory Project (http://dmoz.com/). You may also want to submit yourself to industry-specific directories. But this is best done by hand and not by using cheap auto-submittal software. In fact, it pretty much has to be done by hand for most search engine directories.

Note: Paid directory submission is not the same as paid inclusions. It’s easy to confuse the two because both are concerned with submitting information to the search engines rather than by simply sitting back and allowing th crawlers to do their jobs. But in the former case, you’re submitting yourself to a directory (a categorized listing of sites), whereas with the latter, you’re concerning with ultimately getting your site noticed on the search result pages.

Tactic #5. Link campaign

Google, among others, gives a lot of weight to your site’s incoming links, so link campaigns have become mission critical over the past couple years. Marketers have numerous misconceptions over linking strategies. Here’s our attempt to set the record straight with a list of “link truths”:

• You can’t automate a link campaign. It takes hands-on work, often on the phone. In the early days, you could zap out an emailed form letter to loads of webmasters asking that they link to you. Those days ended years ago. Now, you have to build relationships with sites. Often this means calling people, getting to know them and being very persuasive. You may be able to send effective link request emails, but they’ll work only if you make it obvious that you’ve taken the time to research the site and identify its key players. And, of course, the better your own content is, the more likely you are to impress the other site’s webmaster.

• The longer you run a link campaign, the better. Link campaigns not only require maintenance in case old links are taken down by former partners, they also require ongoing research as new sites, new blogs and new site sections appear online. Unless you have someone looking out for you month after month, year after year, you’ll miss a lot of opportunities. For many sites, a link campaign should be an ongoing budgeted item.

• Any old link won’t do. Links must be from relevant sites that, presumably, visitors at those sites will nd valuable. Link farms (pages or sites containing loads of unrelated links) are of dubious value. Links on your SEO’s other clients’ sites won’t do unless they are directly related to your site’s content.

• Invisible links can get you in trouble - watch your rankings disappear without warning when search engines discover your site appears to be “deceptive.”

•Affiliate and advertising links generally won’t help your link popularity, nor will any links that are redirected on their way to you (such as links passing through “makeashorterlink” or adserving/tracking programs). But that doesn’t mean that all paid links are bad. If a paid link is relevant, it can make good business sense, and the engines won’t necessarily penalize you for it.

• If an online publication writes about you and includes a link in the article, it won’t help your popularity unless the page is visible to search engines - which generally means it’s not restricted behind a required payment or required registration barrier. Sorry, that WSJ.com link may not do you any good from an SEO standpoint, although some online publications are giving the search engines access to their content behind the registration “wall.”

• Internal links can help your campaign. Even more importantly, as marketers as a whole have been learning the value of internal links, not having internal links can hurt your campaign. (That’s one of the reasons most SEO firms insist you add a site map featuring carefully written text links.) Your SEO firm also should advise you on the wording of every single common link your site and sites of partners (vendors, divisions, subsidiaries, resellers, etc.) carry for you. For example, an SEO firm would never let a client run a bland text hotlink such as “Click here” or “Read on” alone. They’d pack it with a keyword instead, such as "Read more about ERP software.”

Tactic #6. Reporting

Some SEO firms offer weekly and even daily or “live” stats for clients. Unless you’re doing a paid inclusion campaign, you probably don’t need to review reports any more frequently than monthly. Even then, you may want to watch trends for a few months in a row before making any significant decisions.

Three months or so after your optimization work is complete, you should see some results. But these can come and go at first. Don’t be surprised to see your new pages in the index one day and have them missing from the search engines the next. While this is less common than it used to be, it is still not unexpected for new pages.

If you’re focusing on highly competitive keyword phrases, you’ll need to make sure you’re conducting a link-building campaign. It can take three to six months for some links to be added to the search engine databases, and it may take equally as long for the popularity you gain from these links to filter through to your site and boost your rankings.

You’ll generally see the quickest and highest results with your least competitive keyword phrases. The more competitive the search terms are, the longer it will take to see results and the more link popularity you will need.  Drops in traffic must be analyzed to determine if additional optimization or tweaks to the current SEO work is necessary. Keep in mind that search engine rankings are never static, and a drop for any given keyword phrase on the search engines isn’t always cause for alarm.

It’s not a good idea to automatically rush in and change things that were working fine in the past. A drop in rankings across many engines for a couple of months in a row should be assessed and changes should be made accordingly.

As a side note: Drops in many engines at the same time often occur when someone in charge of your Web site inadvertently overwrites optimized pages with non-optimized ones. This is an all too common occurrence reported by SEOs, especially when the design department is not fully aware of what the other departments are doing in regards to the SEO campaign. Make sure that all departments have access to the most up-to-date, optimized pages and that any changes they need to make are approved by the SEO company before they are uploaded.

Tactic #7. Search Engine News PR

If you’re not testing this you should be. The good news is you can launch a search engine PR campaign in 24 hours at a very reasonable cost, without having to optimize the rest of your site or even ask your Web or IT department for help. So, it’s perfect when you need attention for a particular new Web page or special offer quickly.  The big search engines all have news sections featuring headlines from traditional sources such as newspaper Web sites. In addition, they all also carry “news headlines” from the major public relations wire services. If you put a press release on the wires via PR Newswire or BusinessWire, it will show up as searchable news in the search engine news sections. Cheaper alternatives, such as PRWeb, now exist to distribute press releases to search engines.

In some cases, your optimized press release doesn’t have to appear anywhere other than on your Web site for it to have a big impact. One publishing company who asked to not be identified put out an optimized press release about a controversial article it was posting on its Web site. Lo and behold, the press release got higher rankings in the search engines than the article itself.

Key press releases don’t last more than 30 days on most news sites, so you can’t count on them for long-term optimization. You also need help from a search term copywriting expert to do a great job of getting attention. This is more complicated than it seems.

Many SEO firms offer PR services as part of their offerings. Be aware that many will outsource the work to a third party. That’s not a bad thing. It’s great to get the most expert advice you can. But if your company has significant news or brand security requirements, you’ll probably want to be the third party personally. So, always find out who is actually doing the work and if anyone outside of the SEO firm will be involved.