Questions on SEO from a newbie to optimization

Hi!
iam a newbie to this forum and to the world of SEO, i have many questions regarding SEO. till now i have read most of the threads/replies on this forum. i have some questions, i need the answers, i hope some one will help me here.
after going through this forum now i know, what is SEO, keywords, link exchange etc.
my questions:

1. if someone follows the IDEAL SEO techniques (that includes, proper and good keyword selection, link building, article submission regularly, listing with all the directories and local directories etc ), how much time does it takes to make a new site to reach the first 2 pages of Search (lets assume the search engine is GOOGLE)?

2. What is Social Bookmarking?

3. is it viable to go for some cheap SEO company, who is ready to do the SEO work for you at a very low price?

4. How much should one invest for getting SEO help from some other company, when one has already followed the IDEAL SEO principals?

5. for Link exchanging, how many relevant and good submissions are needed daily?

6. if SEO is able to help you in getting good PR, they why one would need SMM?

7. what is link farming? (i have a friend who is involved with a company, who call themselves "social internet marketing firm" or "internet viral marketing firm". but what they do, they hire forum posters from all over the world and call them 'Publishers'. these publishers are given signature links with anchor text, and they have to post to different forum/blogs/wiki's etc. the company pays them $0.10 to $0.30 per post.
Is this Legal??
Is this Link Farming???
my friend does 15-20 posts daily and earns $7-8 daily.
One interesting thing about the posting which my friend is doing is, he has posted around 500-600 posts for a an addiction recovery portal based in US (of course it was given to him by that so called social marketing company) and he himself tells that in the last three months whatever postings he did there has been no improvement in the PR of that addiction recovery portal. just imagine if he has done these much postings then how much posting other publishers of that company must have done for that portal (that social marketing company has around 400 publishers).
how come this is not working for that addiction recovery portal.
is this also Black Hat Technique?)

8. what are doorway pages?

i hope iam able to make my self clear in my questions, anybody who answers theses questions, Kindly remember i will be asking many more questions (sorry for that)

best regards
JWP

The best thing to do is to make researches and then follow the webmaster guidelines in SEO. Ethical seo for long term result and consider the quality rather than quantity...