Mike Grehan has been running a two part series of articles over at ClickZ that talks about the best way for a small business to spend a $1000 budget on search engine marketing. The first article, A Grand Plan for SEO that wondered aloud just what a small business might be able to get for their grand.

I'd avoided linking to the article earlier because for the most part, it suggested that $1000 wouldn't buy you anything more than a couple hours of consulting with a search marketing firm. Since I have quite a few quality SEMs in my referral network that often take on small business accounts for under $1000, I didn't really go for that line of thinking. Mike seemed to agree, as he opened up the article to suggestions from readers on how to best spend the money.

Part two of that article, A Grand Plan for SEO: Readers Respond was published today and it does have some good insight in it. From the repeat suggestion of spending that money on a consultation with a top SEO to reality checks about the fact that there are affordable SEM firms to the suggestion that companies combine consulting with DIY plans...there's plenty of options to choose from.