I have a content website, and the content is very good. I have been doing SEO on my site for four months. I have had a one-way backlink request success rate of almost 20%, and reciprocal link request success rate of almost 65%, which I think is very good. However, I want to spend the little time I get off my university on improving my site, rather than SEO. If I hire someone, or some firm to do SEO on my site, how much should I pay? Will adSense or something similar be able to cover the costs?
That depend on how much you are earning monthly from adsense But I think that it will not cover the SEO services.
cost of SEO depends on a few factors: 1) Competition - if your niche or keywords that you want to target it competitive, then the cost will be high! 2) Also it depends on your present Seo status of your site. If your site is already good, getting nice traffic etc. then am sure the costs for further development will be easy and cheap! Can adsense recover your costs? agian depends on your niche, if its a profitable and advertiser friendly niche, then yes, its possible to recover your costs... cheers!
A good rule of thumb is $150 per SEOed page plus ~$35 per month maintenance. But many sites are of a poor design concept that makes SEO impossible or Good Content is not keyword focused. Or the one I love, the keywords are extreamly competitive like "real estate", "mortgage", "adult toys", etc. There you are looking at $2,500 per SEOed page plus ~350 per month maintenance. As for AdSense, it doesn't even offset a small Pay-Per-Click campaign.
It really depends on the type of SEO you want done. SEO is a time consuming and very strenuous activity and I have to admit that there will be alot of people that tell you it can be done for $20. This is a lie. Good SEO takes time and it costs money. Many people charge a set fee per month, some freelancers like myself, just charge an hourly rate. What I would recommend first of all is making a plan and figuring out what you want to do. There is nothing worse than having a customer that says "TOP RANK ME!". As the other guys said keywords are a valuable commodity and obviously the shorter the keyword the longer time and effort it will take to get yourself visible. If you are a hard worker there are a number of things you can do on your own to boost your rank passively. I'm quite happy to give you more information if your interested.
It depends on the topic of your website or the nature of traffic on that particular topic. If you want to rank on the first page of the search engine result page, you must have a strong On-page and OFF-page SEO. Driving traffic is the main thing. Once you got the traffic to your website, it will became comparatively easy for you to rank on the first page of Search Engine Result Page. There are many Digital Advertising Agenciesthat can help to out to boost your wesite.