[David Tan]

Well, I think it's a case of fish for cats and bones for dogs. And there's plenty of cats and there's plenty of dogs.

If you can do it in-house all the better, which would mean more control and you can focus your efforts to fine-tune and to constantly monitor and manage SEM initiatives. Cheaper too in the long run. And I agree that all this hinges on the company really making sure that:-

1) They are commited to this
2) And they know what they're doing

But considering that there will always be people who don't know what they are doing or people who don't feel that it's such a priority to do it in-house, you'll always have cats to market your SEO services to.

In an ideal world, everyone would have a 'learners' attitude. And everyone will be quick to adopt essential skills and utilize it for the company. Heck, why don't we wish for everyone to stop procrastinating, be discipline and committed to what they set out to do. Pack their bags? Maybe give it another hundred years for computers and software to be able to automate everything and come up with good SEOptimized articles and web pages.

I also think that if you know SEO, chances are either you already have your own site to generate income/revenue for you or you're gonna. I mean, why not? If what you do brings value and helps businesses, why not help yourself?

But I believe if such skill and knowledge were to be widespread (another 50 years?) then the competition is gonna be intense and it'll cancel out alot of the edge that you may initially have. Maybe it'll start another breed of 'Super SEO Experts (Captain SEO?) or search engines could start charging and make it impossible to be featured in the first page without paying loads of cash. Could happen when the demand is really high and they hold lots of ze power.

And lastly, what would stop Google from eventually (40 years?) expanding to other businesses in other industries and rigging their sites' search listing to give them an unfair advantage and to perpetuate a monolopy that will....RULE THE WORLD! Good thing business growth is not all about SEO and internet marketing.