Rand Fishkin has been cranking out some serious Q&A threads on the SEOMoz blog covering everything from his whiskey vs brandy preferences, to things related to SEO.

One question that seemed particularly interesting to me was how one should deal with SEO on a small budget. How much should a company spend in order to optimize their website?

Speaking from experience, optimization can be a tedious process to do to a completed website. In some cases, the best solution is to simply throw away the current site and rebuild the content on a more SEO-friendly platform.

Rand's advice seems aligned with this logic where he recommends building sites on Wordpress or Drupal:

Let's say I have $5,000.00 available to spend on SEO. It's not enough to hire you guys, but what or whom would you recommend to spend the money on (for SEO of course ;))?

It really, really depends on what you need to do. If you want a site audit and someone to help you fix things up, there's a ton of good companies on the recommended list. I'd say that at least 30% of them offer services in the range of $5K for simple audit + recommendations.

If you're just starting out, though, I'd probably pay it all to a fantastic designer/developer who can build you a great looking site on Wordpress or Drupal, then get to work yourself putting together kickass content.

Neither platform is perfect, but you'll be way ahead of the curve is you start with a platform that generates search engine indexable pages and unique URLs for every page.

Or, you could pay someone a few thousand dollars to generate a list of recommendations that do what Wordpress or Drupal does right out of the box. Then pay a few thousand more to have those changes implemented. The choice seems obvious.