what is SEO worth

I have been researching the value of SEO from a salary perspective and there doesn’t seem to be any good information on the topic. So really what is SEO worth and I wont even qualify that by saying good SEO just SEO in general. I think it can make a company on the web, with out it there competition is going to win. Yes I can throw a page together and then I can stumble through posting it to a server and the people at godaddy can help my get it the domain name setup but then what? its not like the IBM ad where the orders fall on top of you and crush you with the sheer weight of the money you are going home with each and every day. no it takes work and lots of it I don’t think you can do SEO part time and be successful at it. you have to be on top of three search engines and then on top of your site. i have one site that rankings number one on google for the phrase “red frog labs” and that is great but its only 6 pages and who is going to be searching for red frog labs. When you start looking at doing SEO on a larger site then it becomes a much harder thing to accomplish and a harder thing to maintain. You have to worry about things like theme and freshness of content. so when you try to determine worth do you break up the job and say each of these pieces is worth a set amount and then add up the total? I don’t think that takes in to account the “glue”, for lack of a better word, that holds it all together. If you try and find a similar job then that’s not much help either because SEO is a new field. But that should be common since most of the web and technology jobs are really new fields. As a freelance SEO expert you could really sort of set your own rates and then if you are good enough and are not to far out of line you will succeed but as a corporate lackey how do you go to your bosses and express a need to increase your salary. What I have done is look at the money already being spent with outside firms doing SEO for us then scale that by experience and current knowledge of our existing system. I also adjusted for my time and what I need to make for my 5 year plan to stay on track and I came up with what I thought was fair. It is less then some people in this area are making for much less work but it is enough for me to pour myself into this SEO project and make it a success. I am also working on a few outside SEO projects and as a freelancer working with small businesses I am just charging a percentage all the little sites I am working with depend on advertising to drive revenue so if I get them more traffic I get part of that revenue I would love to implement this model at my day job just 1/10th of 1 percent of the increase in revenue and I would be able to retire after two years.

-Jon