There’s a big difference between “cheap” and terms like “affordable” or “good value”. “Cheap” has an unfortunate connotation. When combined with “SEO” that connotation is only reinforced.

I searched for “cheap seo” in Google. Two of the organic results in the top 5 results caught my attention. The first one promises a 500 word article on your nominated keyword theme, this article is then spun into 10 variations and posted on a series of blogs. These articles then point to your web page on that same theme. All for the low price of $69.95. The theory here is that a link is a link is a link and the content only has to be vaguely relevant to the theme with little regard for the quality of the writing or the relevance of the blogs pointing to your site. This process is largely the target of Google’s recent Panda and Penguin algorithm changes. At best, this $70 expense will do nothing. But I suspect it is more likely to lower the long term ranking and leave the site worse off, still needing to spend money to offset the damage before even hoping to improve.

The second site I noticed in my search offers a series of packages with pricing varying with the number of keywords targeted. Prices range from $299 to $1999. For whichever outlay you choose you get an audit and a monthly report. My concern with this set of offers is it’s not clear exactly what work will be undertaken. With no samples shown, the audit report and monthly report (on what exactly is unclear) may be incomprehensible for a non-technical person and therefore valueless. I could find no meaningful information on the rest of the site about the methods to be used. The value in this proposition can’t be assessed. There is no indication if the prices quoted are recurring or one off. It’s hard to imagine the monthly reports would continue indefinitely.

The first SEO program scares me. It’s hard to see how it conforms with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. The second offering lacks too many details to be useful. Of course, the actual offerings and the way they are presented online may be very different. I hope so, for the sake of anyone taking the plunge.

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