waste of money – it doesn’t sound free if they charge you USD425 a month

Ignore the traffic. How much money is she making from the site? If she’s not recouping the $425, then she’s losing money.

What I suggest to my clients is before focusing on the SEO, focus on the content of your site itself. Who is your target market? What problem of theirs do you solve? How do you solve it? You don’t just want traffic – you want people who desperately want what you’re selling. You need a strategic marketing plan. Once that’s in place, you can improve your site with SEO because you’re be increasing the right type of traffic.

Is it worth it?

IF AND ONLY IF you can recoup that investment every month and earn more han $425/month from your traffic. Otherwise, it could be a huge drain on your pocket

One other thing to remember is that some of these SEO companies will promise to bring you traffic — at the expense of your site. They use what is called “black hat SEO strategies” that search engines hate — and if caught your site can be blacklisted. That means your site will not be indexed by the search engines at all as punishment for using these black hat strategies. Examples include doorway pages, keyword stuffing, etc.

And hits are meaningless — if an SEO company talks about “hits” please run away. They are newbies like you. You are better off going to webmaster forums and search engine forums and learning about SEO yourself.

I checked the website you offered — and they have ZERO Pagerank. It means they are very new — and unproven — or that they don’t know SEO if they can’t even make their own website get a good pagerank. As such, $425/month is WAY TOO EXPENSIVE for their services.

I suggest you visit the following websites

WebmasterWorld.com Google Press Releases
Matt Cutts Blog (Matt is a Google software engineer)
Digitalpoint Yahoo Forums
SearchEngineWatch’s MSN Forums

EDIT:
Again hits are MEANINGLESS. Nobody talks of hits. It is irrelevant. A site that has 100 images on a page can have 505 hits (500 images + 5 html page) with 5 visitors while a site with 100 visitors and only an HTML page with no graphics can have 100 visits amnd only 100 hits. Talk about visits, pageviews and unique visitors

I’ve been running my own websites for about 3 years now. I can’t count how many hours I spent studying SEO. In all honesty, I would never recommend paying for it, because I know anyone can do it themselves. It’s not that difficult to understand. One misconception is submitting to search engines – it simply isn’t necessary. Head over to digital point forums. There are 100s of professional webmasters who are willing to help you with any aspect of running a website.

It depends on the affiliate program. Each vendor has their own method of approval. Typically a “free” site like GeoCities or Tripod will not be approved.

However, let’s say you started a really interesting blog at Blogger.com — one thing you COULD do there is Google AdSense.

I’m not that smart, but I would say if you have the extra money why not.