Thanks for elaborating! I love the discussion. I think we’re largely on the same page here with respect to this discussion because everything your saying is absolutely true except for the fact that there are very few developers who know how to build a website to rank well with the search engines. I can say that with confidence because I worked as a solution architect and project manager for over 10 years in the industry - and this is what drove me into SEO.

All of our clients have had websites built that had virtually NO thinking about search engines put into them, let alone the copy writing for the target audience.

Finally, the most crucial part is link building - we end up doing it on their behalf because the clients we deal with our busy running their business and are not interested in bulding the links themselves. That being said, we do work hard to involve clients in the link building process especially where it’s easily done. Such as posting on their blog and promoting the content in various places.

I’m also proud to say I don’t have a big bag of high PR sites I can buy links from. Given the climate these days around link buying that’s a dangerous prospect for our clients which we avoid.

In conclusion - you are an SEO! The only difference is that you do it on a project basis with no interest in working with clients longer term on their accounts! I have a local contractor who does SEO for Agencies in exactly this manner - on a project basis with no longer term contract with the clients!

I’m actually a web developer (and copy-writer) by trade, and I’m consistently amazed at how much “SEO” companies charge for doing things which I just do as a matter of course when developing a site.

Developing site structure? Might as well get the keywords in the title, H1, H2 etc while you’re there.

Writing some website copy? Well let’s make sure we get our keyword densities around the mark while we’re writing the copy rather than trying to stuff them in later.

I also have prepared materials which explain to my clients how to search technorati etc to find blogs in their market, and get involved in the conversation. As a result of this, they get their link out there. I also explain to them that it’s in their best interestes to try to keep building quality links over a long period of time.

I’d re-iterate my previous comment by saying what I said before - The one key thing that (good) SEO firms have at their disposal is a bucketload of authority places to drop links. But be careful, because once you stop paying, those links disappear, and your ranking plummets.

Good, solid SEO can be done by a developer who has a very basic understanding of site structure, a copywriter who knows how to count how many time their keyword appears on a page, and a client who is willing to do the hard yards over a long period of time building links.

That is all….

I do have to disagree with you on this point. There are far too many businesses who don’t know how to hire the right web developer, and far too many web developers don’t follow standards because they are not interested in internet marketing or search engines.

While some business may stumble across the right developer - most of them don’t!

A good search engine optimization firm works very hard to develop strong naturall occuring back links and only when necessary resorts to purchasing links - but then only from above the board places suchas Yahoo!, Business.com and Best Of The Web to name a few.

Based on your comments it sounds like you alot about Internet Marketing - which is why you’ve formed this opinion. The troubel is that most business owners don’t have this understanding - simply because their in a different business!

Thanks!