What should an SEO be getting paid per client?

Just trying to get a ballpark figure here as I've always done SEO work for my own sites and never someone elses. What is the current going rate and how do you determine it?

You cant really answer that question as a lot depends on experience, methodology, the complexity of a site to be optimized pricing model (monthly/one off fee) etc. etc. I have seen from as low as 100 dollars per domain to as much as 15,000. Average is probably around 400-1000 dollars per domain. It does however vary wildly geographically as well.

I personally range between $700 and $1.500 per domain based on the individual task, complexity of the site to be optimized. I have am SEO friend who charges $5,000 per domain. it depends really on what you personally feel comfortable charging for your services.

YOU CHARGE HOW MUCH!?

And, my next question. Has anyone ever paid you that much? And if so, I think I need to get into doing this for a living too.

LOL,
And I'm really on the lower scale Amy ;-)

You see, what I charge is nothing compared to a standard banner ad campaign with its unqualified / targeted traffic. My results last in the search engines as I do not use "unethical" methodology, The ROI is far superior than traditional print/online advertisement. I offer a money back guarantee if I cant produce the goods, and I have more work than I can shake a stick at :-)
So yes, it is a perfectly acceptable fee. I don't just tweak meta tags ya know! :-)

I see.

nice pic, webby!

Webby,
I am currently starting up my own website design business and I am wanting to incorporate some SEO into the business. I am currently the webmaster for a business in the boiler supply arena and have been having some decent success in staying the top ten area of Google. We have an average page rank of 3-4 PR. I am looking to try and figure out how to push my page ranking up and move up to the next level. Can you make any suggestions on where to do some research at in order to take things up a notch?

Thanks,
Steve

Well there is no real substitute for experience, however, one of the best english language tutorials I've come across is spider-food.net. Other good ones include http://www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/intro.html.

If you find those tutorials are not going to teach you anything, hang about here, use the search facility or try other SEO forums (I wont name them out of respect for the owners of this forum but a search on Google will find them for you). If you have a specific question I'm sure the moderators or myself here could help you here. If you want generally advanced techniques then search the forums I say. That way at least what you have will be up to date.

Well good luck and I hope I've helped a little.

One last note - Be creative. We SEO's will share a lot of information, but we almost always keep little tricks to ourselves (and they are usually the most important ones).

I see what you mean there Darrin. Well then there is always the old faithful ... trial and error. Just cant charge for that ...

When an SEO propose a quote what guarantee are submited to the client?
Do you guarantee to be in the top 3 on google?
Do you guarantee to be present on any major directory on the 1st page?
Do you guarantee one of these results in a month, 2 months, more... and how do you decide a time limit if no adequate results are obtained?

Every comapny is different in how they handle guarantees. Many offer no guarantees at all. Some, like myself, offer money back guarantees, some offer specific ranking guarantees (be wary, commonly sponsored listings).

You can't really generalise.

The best way to get a higher PR is to make more links for your site. Right now i have a PR of 7. I got that PR just cuz of making backword links. But make sure that the pages that you are linking too have PR higher than 5 or 5. Don't go into guestbooks and just make links there. Google will penalize that. So best is to make quality links with quality websites. Which takes time. I am SEO ...if you want i can make quality links for you. But ofcourse i will be charging money.
Thanks
Sunny

Guessbook signing may not be the "best" strategy - but nothing bad can come from inboind links.

Google may penalize a guessbook of a site -- but it can't penalize a site being "link to" from a guest book.

Google can NOT penalize ANY site for ANY inbound links. If this were the case, we'd have a wave of unscrupulous webmasters creating tons of invalid links to competitor's sites in the hopes of getting them banned, i.e. I would simply search out 1,000 guestbooks and put my top competitor into them.

This seems to be a recurring misconception on this board.