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If you've had a website for a while, chances are you receive the occasional email from someone (often from overseas) offering you an SEO package that guarantees you keywords in the top 10 results of Google for a low low price of $99 per month with results in 60 days!
Sounds like a pretty good deal!! BUT (and there is always a "but") does it work? Absolutely, you will see more traffic and your rankings will increase! BUT how long does it work for?? You might be lucky to get a few months of benefits until Google picks up the dodgy tactics that have been used to attain those rankings and quickly proceeds to flatline your traffic from them. Think of your website as a country like Iran who's been busted importing enriched uranium after being told not to do so and now the rest of the world has now imposed an embargo against you. No more enriched uranium for you… err I mean traffic.
Basically: 
Quite often their SEO plans will look like this:
Monthly task and Responsibilities:-
- 500 directory submissions
- 40 Social book marking submissions
- 40 article submissions (1 article x 10 article directories)
- 10 press release submissions (1 press release x 10 press release websites)
- 10 blog submissions
- 1 unique, 400 word article
- 1 unique, 400 word press release
- 15 one way back links with mix PR
- Meta tag changes
- Keyword research
- Competitor analysis
- Heading tag changes
- Alt tag changes
- Interlinking wherever required
- Keyword density in site content
- HTML site map
- XML site map and submission in webmaster tool
Now I bet your thinking "I have no idea what that means but it sounds like a good deal for a few bucks a month."
I've broken it down a bit below:
Points 1 - 8 are all link building activities. Basically the more links you have on your site the better you will rank. But not all links are created equal, and most of these are all spammy, low quality links which is the main thing the big G frowns upon. Note point 8: Mix of PR. PR stands for Page Rank. Higher the better. Most of the links they will be building will be 0-1 links from sites on unrelated topics to yours which is not good for your long term rankability.
Points 3-7: The articles they produce are rubbish… it's hard enough to get a PR professional in Sydney to do a good job of this let a lone some dude on the other side of the planet!
Points 9 -17: These shouldn't need to be done on a monthly basis, and are just padding to their offering. 16 & 17 should really be automated by your website. You could probably employ them to perform these activities for you without any consequences however. But they more than likely don't understand your business and the keywords they would be targeting would be ones you come up with.
Still think that $100 per month is good value?
What does a sustainable online marketing plan look like?
Now unfortunately (or fortunately) a sustainable online marketing plan takes a lot more time and effort to execute. You will need a quality content plan and a website that makes it easy to optimize it and roll the content out on a regular basis. Not only that, you are looking at 6-12 months until you start seeing decent results (quality leads, traffic trending upwards and increased rankings for your targeted keywords etc).
The first 6 months are HARD! Especially if you're a small to medium sized business with limited resources as you will be wondering why the heck you spending all this time and money on these activities. BUT once you get your inbound lead machine up and running you will be kicking yourself that you didn't start the process sooner. Also, if your website/domain name is brand new (you start with a Google PR score of 0/10 which makes it harder to rank), you should probably add another 3-6 months before you start seeing decent organic results.
That's a pretty basic overview of what works well for us and our clients. We will be producing some more articles on sustainable online marketing shortly.
If you would like some help with your strategy, feel free to get in touch, we'd be happy to help (but we charge slightly more than $100 per month). ¼