How much does everyone spend on SEO monthly/yearly? Can anyone recommend a reliable company that does SEO and delivers what they promise?

Ali, I have never used SEO services and I am not sure I will. It takes a lot of time, effort and money to sustain search engine positions.

While we know what the benefits can be, think of potential cons:
- if the person managing the SEO process isn't experienced, he might overlook certain rules that might ban your site from a search engine altogether;
- once you get in top 20 or top 10 listings, it will take a lot of time and money to sustain your position;

A lot of times content and relationship building with strong resources is what really pays off. I would personally rather invest in text-link advertising that is located on serious pages like InfoWorld or ZDNet (or smaller but quality tech resources) rather than spending same hundreds of dollars on something that might not last you even a few months.

Best,

IMO SEO is such a hands on time consuming approach that getting quality manpower is bound to be expensive at the end of the day.

On page SEO is relatively easy, but there's only so much edge that you can gain with it. Past that, comes off page SEO, and there, only the sky is the limit. The real SEO winners are those who manage to build link popularity naturally. Not an easy thing to do when you're a host, I know, which is why link building via "free hosting" might make some sense.

I would agree with the last two. We do not pay for SEO, we try to follow some basics to give us a bit of SEO help but beyond that...

I spend about $300 monthly.

For what kind of service exactly? Do you see any return on that investment? Can you recommend the company you're using?