I sat in a meeting at the university today and listened to a sales pitch by an SEO company. We get calls at The Plan Collection for these all the time.
I need to setup one of these companies. They are usually run by a couple of jokers who know very little about SEO. In this case the jokers were looking for easy money. They wanted 10k for a ‘keyword analysis’ and 10k to optimize 10 pages. Holy Crap!
The ‘analysis’ involved a bunch of people at the university running around coming up with the ‘things they want to advertise’ – read keywords. Not sure what that leaves for the SEO company to do. I guess they can type it up. Makes them a pretty dang expensive secretary. They then wanted to charge to setup an adwords campaign – you know because Google makes that process so hard.
My tip?
Start with SEOChat.com. This site is a vibrant community of real SEO pros that will tell you all kinds of neat stuff for free. Work a little and save yourself the tens of thousands of dollars.