LOL
SEO is a skill yes. Not every SEO wants to own and operate 100's of sites. Not every SEO wants the risk and responsibilities of owning and maintaining adult sites and publishing adult content. You SEO a site and build it out once, do it right the first time and it'll have good results for the long term. In order to make money you need to build out a lot of property, maintain it, host it, populate it with valuable content, and it ends up more of a web site business than actually SEO work. So if your specialty is SEO and you can make a couple hundred an hour optimizing others projects and moving on, without any over head, risk, etc, why not. Sure you can have your own stuff on the side, but honestly, anyone who thinks an SEO has nothing to gain by freelancing or working full time for a company as a key marketing personnel (with benefits and steady paycheck) is out of their minds. There are good and bad optimizers out there. The good are hard to find b/c they are particular about the work and clients they take on. Most good ones will analyze the site (code, goals, content) and decide if it's one they can help or not. It is very hands on, very labor intensive, and you get very involved in the web operations and business of your clients. Once the work is completed, believe it or not, the rest is out of the SEO's hands as well. Overwrites on site updates, infrastructure (code method) changes, dynamic elements, all of this comes into play. What most people don't realize is SEO comes into play during site development, including design, not as an afterthought. This is why it's in most web based companies best interest to retain someone with SEO skills in house, and they pay for it. While good optimization can result for the long term, growing means building , and an inhouse person keeps an eye on the best interest of marketing throughout development from initial to sustained. Believe it or not, these SEO's or "internet marketers" or "marketing directors" are paid well, can go home to their families and sleep without any worries about algorithm changes affecting their ability to pay bills or if their 100 sites are 2257 compliant or some shit.
To judge an SEO on their decisions on how they apply their skills is stupid. Judge them by the results from their work.
