How about saying the money you want to spend on SEO and use it instead to pay for quality content? As they always say, content is king and if you have the right content, the traffic will come by itself. Don't worry about the bots. They are always busy crawling all over the place. Sort of like nosy newspaper reporters. If you have something newsworthy, the reporters will come without being asked. Same for bots. If you have content worth indexing, the bots will automatically do their job.