Remember if you pay a company or someone for
SEO - Remember you are paying for time.- Specifically you are paying for the time someone will sit in front of your website and hopefully, as an added bonus, know what he or she is doing. Some big so called
SEO specialist companies/ web developers/IT companies etc. have so many sites to work on and so few hours in the day to do it. You could be paying a monthly fee and the
SEO guy (and a different one each time possibly) could be looking at your site for all of 10 mins total per week. You'll be billed for full service and be none the wiser. Good
SEO people are hard to find -and they're in great demand because they have years of practice and experience behind them-They've seen the trends and know the way forward.
When I ran my site, I had a full time
SEO guy because it's a full time job and no outsourced company could possibly do the work on a website than one good & dedicated inhouse
seo person day in and day out.
But as has been said if the basic fundamentals of the site are good, it just takes time to gain
PR.
SEO technique is changing all the time and as someone said- theme density might just well be the next big thing.
One other point I agree with is the domain name must closely relate to the content of the site and there must be judicious use of that keyword thoughout.