I think the biggest problem with treating SEO as a profession on its own is that higher level executives, who assign budgets for such items, have a hard time attaching a value or ROI to SEO. I am with an agency for all of my local work, and didn't get a job recently because the company in question was reluctant to pay my fee (sorry, 50.00 an hour for a daily commute of 50K plus, not a penny less - I don't think it was unreasonable).

I told my agent, who was completely down on my side of the battle, that they could easily hire a person who was straight of college and all pie-eyed with wondrous ideas like "keyword stuffing is the bomb, wow I'll bet no-one has ever thought of that before", or they could hire someone who has run the gamut of everything that the search engines consider legal or illegal, and not get their site banned from Google in the process of getting it onto the first page. In the end the dollar won, and I'm glad that I didn't get that job because obviously they didn't grok the importance of an experienced SEO professional even with such a simplistic explanation of the difference between experienced and non-experienced. I myself do not fit the role of crazy smart guru, but I could do what this company was asking for (and much more) and have been in the business of performing SEO on my own sites since 1996. I'm just not as scary good as some of the SEO experts of this world, and I am very honest about this fact.

The sad truth is that there are a ton of "professionals" out there who do not get SEO and will probably make mistakes on someone else's dime to learn SEO. That's fine, but it really makes the profession as a whole look like a snake-oil salesman's club. I say if you have someone who is willing to work for you for $20.00/hr, you have yourself a person who doesn't know bubkiss about nothing, and you should stay away. A true professional shouldn't just be telling you what they can do, they should be telling you what they can't do.

To get back to the question - is SEO a profession in and of itself? Yes. Do people in charge of the money realize it? Not unless they are true web marketing professionals, and if they are they are probably busy off making money somewhere else that isn't a stuffy cubicle. I had a hard enough time at one of my jobs convincing my older boss that I needed to be both webmaster and SEO full time in order to give our company the web presence we needed - in fact I didn't and I am no longer there partially because of that.

Until the dinosaurs truly let go of the corporate purse strings, SEO is not a full-time job, but rather a full-time freelancing gig that may get you hired somewhere if you are lucky. I am sure that a paradigm shift will occur on this sometime in the next five years, but until then I would start out with your own business, build a client list, and educate yourself as much as possible on both web development and SEO principles. Spending too much time in school will do you no good - try to get mentored by an SEO professional (or just regularly read these boards - I've been lurking here for years) and see if you can get a few smaller, easier projects to start out with. By the time firms need SEO people full time, you will have evolved your experience to the point that you'll be snapped up in an instant, or you'll have grown your own business to a point where you don't need to worry about a lifelong career somewhere other than your own house. Either way good.

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