Voodoo, I think you misunderstood my post. First of all, I agree with you, this is a burgeoning industry that will become key to the marketing success of just about any company in the future. What I was meaning to explain about the college kids is the company I was talking about. They have a really good head of SEO in their company (they are a consultant to mid-sized companies, many of their clients you would recognize), what he has trouble finding is people willing to do the grunt work of gaining links. He hires 2 or 3 new out of college types every quarter to work the day-to-day stuff.
The point I guess is that yes SEO is extremely time consuming and I would see more monetary benefit from doing it for yourself than for a Fortune 500 that will pay you maybe $50 per hour plus benefits. If you can get a $400,000 a year salary, (approx. $200/hour) maybe that’s another story. I’m not saying it is beyond possibility, heck I used to bill out at $225 an hour to clients, but that was the heyday of the Web, and I was doing things that hardly anyone else knew how to do. We are at that point right now with SEO, but the learning curve will quickly catch up, so it might be a small window of opportunity.
In any case, my day job is as an Internet consultant, and we are already offering this service to our smaller clients as a test offering. Our first site hit the top 10 in Google in 3 weeks. It’s nice doing this in a less competitive industry and for a site that is 6+ years old. Makes SEO a breeze.
You can absolutely charge more for these services than you can for design or web development. Where there is mystery there is margin.