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.

It’s going to depend on the web site you’re working with. Some use the IP address of the sender to decide who gets credit for the click. In this case, the auction site would get the credit. Others let you embed sender info in the link, in which case your plan may work.

I’d warn you, though, that most web sites where you can post things (including yahoo answers) have specific rules against what you’re trying to do. And most people who browse those sites get annoyed at people who are doing what you’re talking about doing. You won’t win many friends this way.

The way affiliate schemes operate you have to have a website to promote the link or banner.

Usually if you sign up they will ask for a URL of your website

Nope; those programs by definition are for placing the banners on your own websites. (And the owners of those other websites will treat you as a parasitic abuser and/or vandal.)

Remember to keep your keywords *general* (like, using the general categories you imagine folks will be searching for, to arrive at your site, instead of the keywords your site contains! like, if your site is The Exciting Baseball Company, you might list “baseball” as a keyword instead of “exciting”) And your “description” of course should be that sentence that will appear when your website appears in the search results.

Given those two things, change your meta information as often as is appropriate to change those two effects. You will be accordingly penalized and/or advantaged. See and judge this and other search crawler criteria in the cited source.