IMO, paying someone else for
SEO (search engine optimization is the industry term, not search engine placement) is a waste of money. There are 2 ways to get your site high in the search engines: pay the search engines , or optimize your site.
If you're gonna pay someone to optimize your site so that you MIGHT get higher in the search engines, why not just pay for placement with the search engines themselves?
My preferred method would be to optimize my site myself. There are BUCKETLOADS of tips on the web to help you out. There are newsletters that I subscribe to (
www.highrankings.com,
www.searchenginepatrol.com, and many others, google for
SEO newsletter). My favorite has been SiteProNews.com, although that one has been offline now for a couple weeks, not sure why. Their newsletters were definitely the most informative I have read on the subject.
The main thing these days for search engines is content, content, content. If you don't have a lot of content, you have to make it LOOK like you do.
To boil it down, any
SEO pro will tell you to choose a few keywords and keyword phrases and concentrate on making your site relevant to THOSE keywords. Don't try to be everything to everyone by having too many keywords to concentrate on, settle on a handful and work towards those. Make sure your keywords show up liberally throughout your site in content, links, titles, headers (we're talking H1, H2, etc. not meta tags).
Link to as many other relevant sites as possible, and try to get those sites to link back to you.
The search engines don't like to be fooled, and when they find out they have been, they can sometimes penalize your site for that. That said, there are a few ways to "fool" the search engines without them knowing.
Stay away from cheap tricks like hidden links, hidden text (text the same color as the background), and the like. You WILL be penalized for that on most engines.
Do these things, and more. Find out as much as you can on what ELSE you can do with your site. Don't put all your eggs in one basket, and don't concentrate too much on any one method.
Don't worry too much about submitting your site to search engines. If your content is good enough to merit placement, then they will find you. People who charge to submit other people's sites to search engines are just ripping you off.
(Don't tell my boss I said that, as these are all services that we provide. I'm just trying to clear my concience here, I guess).
To sum up,
SEO is very much a DIY project, and you can get the same results from DIY as you can from for-pay
SEO.
IMO, Str8jakit
hardware
prices 
