If you had $650 a month for SEO, what would you do?

It depends if you are talking about $650 to spend on getting someone else to do the SEO work for you, or if you plan on doing it yourself.

I'll give you my point of view as if you are doing it yourself, because that's what I'm currently doing. I'd first make sure I have all the best tools. These would be keyword research tools such as MS, and SEO Plugin to help on-page SEO, a decent link building service for a nice platform of links, and then a method for getting high PR backlinks, be it a service or paying webmasters to put your link on their site. For high PR links I have previously been reverse engineering sites that rank well for competitive keywords, but I've recently started using a service for this.

That's a lot for SEO. Why not SEM?

Look in the warrior for hire section and or the WSO section.

You could pay for various back linking services and content creation with that kind of money per month.

I would just split up between different types of links. Bookmarks, profiles, comments, web 2.0s, article marketing/submissions, and more. What would you do?

I would hire a website designer and people to write my articles

My plan would be diversified links for sure 'all white-hat'
I'd look for $0.30 or lower per link (Dividing the no. of links i guarantee with the spending amount)
Best regards,
-S

I would hire some effective free lancers and outsource the SEO work.

Wow, how insightful. Quit posting garbage to increase your post count.

This is what I do, and you don't need to spends $650 per month. You can if you want to go after a bunch of keywords but it is not necessary.

1) Research your keywords (The best way is mentioned above. Spend a couple hundred of dollars on adwords and find which keywords get the most impressions/conversions. Make sure conversion tracking is in place. $200)

2) Make sure your on site is properly done. (Free)

3) Get site indexed. Good ways to do this is social bookmarking or post a couple ads on backpage.com/Craigslist.com with the your website in the ad. (FREE-$10

4) Manual Submission Directories- I always have my guys in India do a bunch of manual submission directories. ($15-90 depending on how many you do)

5) Article Syndication- This helps my sites tremendously. I use EZ Article link. ($29.99 per month for unlimited domains)

6) Buy some high authority links PR-3+ (Varies)

7) I always put my links with keyword in anchor text on every forum I participate in. Especially if it is niche relevant. (FREE)

8) Buy some edu links ($15)

9) Keep an eye out for good deals on SEO packages here and on other forums.

I would buy some high pr backlinks and hire peoples to write articles.

I would get as many quality backlinks as possible using software/services for article distribution, links from high PR home pages, press releases, bookmarks, blog comments, forum profiles (probably in that order). The final step is an indexing network to make sure all of your links are indexed.

Assuming your on-page is in order, I'd target some custom packages. Whatever it is, just make sure it's of high quality.

I'd lean towards using the money towards a number of tools that could help automate my tasks, instead of using it monthly to outsource SEO.

Instead, after I've bought my tools, I'd use some of that money to outsource content creation for my own sites + dabble in a little PPC for building my lists. Maybe I'd purchase some high PR backlinks, but that's about it.

It depends on the site. It might not even need $650 a months worth of seo. And if it's for the typical local marketing seo that some folks do, it won't even take $650 a year.

You can use those to write articles and outsource linkbuilding and bookmarking,web2.0 etc.And monitor the results using Market samurai is great idea.