There have been a lot of good points made in this thread and is exactly why I frequent this forum. I myself have been working with
SEO for about 5 years. I don't call myself an expert,
but experience has taught me that people that claim to be professional website designers, that don't know anything about
SEO or usability, are causing many small to medium sized business' some major heartache and more often than not, alot of money. These people should stick to designing family tree websites or something other than business sites as a rule! My latest client has paid me alot of money to redesign their current ($1300)website for
SEO and usability. The money they spent on the original design was wasted as the site now looks totally different with the exception of a few graphics I was able to incorporate into the new design. Not to mention the thousands they spent on ppc advertising for six months with literally no ROI.
In my opinion
SEO cannot be a profession. It is similar to a scripting language such as HTML, CSS, FLASH, JAVASCRIPT etc... It must be learned and unfortunately among website designers, it is not always a learned skill, just as not all website designers(me included) know Flash. In a larger corporate type situation, I have to agree with what Peter said
Quote "It would be best to have this person not work in any of the departments but to have her/him report straight to higher management. That will take out the competition factor so people are more willing to agree. "
Even in this situation I would still have to say that
SEO is not a profession, just a learned skill, that happens to be the main skill used in this job role. I would label this profession as an
SEO consultant.
Just my $.O2