There is no "cheap" word in SEO business, the ones that does cheap SEO they are not telling the truth and you will not get what you paied for. You have reserach the background of the company / seo expert that you are hiring. Its hard to find a good company that can actually do SEO, the most of them promise to bring you on the top 10 but its hard to rank that high. If you want you can learn SEO for free just searching on Google, its not that hard. Try to think of it like these:
In SEO there are only 2 factors, which are:
- On-Page (you only work on itle tags, meta tags, alt tags, link structure, keyword density, robots.txt file, xml sitemap, spell check, custom 404 error pages, Hyperlink Optimization, W3C Validation, adding 301 redirects)
- Off-Page (you build links Directory Submission, Link Dump, Linkwheel, Social Bookmarking, Profile Links, Myspace Promotion, Facebook Promotion, Twitter Promotion, Yahoogroup promotion, website designing, Banners and logos, Article writing, Forum posting, Blog commenting and so on)
Good luck with your projects