Before and after Google's Penguin and Panda updates, I get numerous email advertisements from "SEO Experts Who Can Get Your 4 Week Old Website Ranked On Page One In 2 Weeks For 8 Keyword Terms". I'm sure if you're doing SEO on your websites you get the same crap. Sadly, 99.9% of these "Experts" don't offer any back up research or data to prove why their system works. Most of these so-called experts are expert marketing people only....selling their brand of bullsh_t. I've thrown a lot of good money at these "Experts", with nothing to show for it.....oh wait a minute, one of them managed to get one of my ranking websites reduced to page 98 in Google. I'm methodically looking for SEO help that actually works to improve my position in the Google SERPs. Please, if you've had some legitimate good results let me know how I can contact the SEO person(s).
Spend the money on building a high PR network and/or some quality links, this is what a half decent SEO company will do to get your site ranked, but obviously charge you a fee on top.
SEO Isn't that hard, I've built a dozen or so sites in the last two years and have them ranking on the first page, often times in the first position on the first page. What it basically comes down to is content on your site and links to your site.
One of the best things you can do is to continue learning as much as you can about SEO while you try to find a company that is halfway competent in doing it. If you look around you can find some SEO companies that will do you a good service, but you will always be at a huge disadvantage. If you really immerse yourself in SEO and read all you can (and more importantly, TEST) you will find that you know more than 99% of those guys that are charging so much money for a crummy link pyramid made with SENUKE. Learn enough, and you can make your own pyramids for 1/50th the price anytime you want, and you'll learn a ton. Like James above said though, try to buy some high PR domains and make your own resources. It's actually not that hard to do, and it will pay for itself tenfold.
I forgot the most important thing. So much of SEO is keywords. If you try to rank for some huge keyword with 10,000 other SEO's trying to rank for it too, you'll need a huge network of PR6 sites to get past the pack. If you can get past those paid keyword tools and look at keywords differently there are tons and tons of untapped keywords out there that get a lot of searches and have zero competition. More than that though, you can rank for these terms so easily with not a lot of complicated SEO.
No one can promise where you will rank in Google or other Search Engines. Google Controls Google rankings. Yahoo controls Yahoo Rankings. These SEO experts have no control over search engine rankings and thus cannot guarantee anything.
Getting tired of these self claimed "experts"... I is like everybody who can build backlink is now an SEO Expert or Guru... Its sad really...
I agree with you I'm a SEO and Site builder - and I don't even class back-link building as SEO - I class it as site promotion